Dunnhumby, the world’s leading customer-science company, hosted its first Hackathon in India for students and professionals who are passionate about data. The mission at hand was to help a failing retail business identify ways to transform into a profitable venture by leveraging the power of data. Participants competed for the grand prize of Rs 250,000 using pure brain power and data analytics tools. 
“dunnhumby India’s first Hackathon was a great success. Every time I visit India and our teams here, I get to experience abundance of passion and creative energy and this event was no different. This was a great opportunity for us to bring together the best data science minds in the Delhi-NCR region and see what they can achieve in a time-pressured environment as they seek to creatively resolve complex data science challenges.” said Yael Cosset, Chief Information Officer, dunnhumby.
The event saw a participation mix of students from various engineering colleges of Delhi as well as professionals with two-five years of experience competing individually or in teams of up to three members. The challenge was divided into two parts and participants were given information on customers, products, stores, transactional data and time information. Participants were scored on Design, Data Structure and Quality of output and the logic/rationale behind the approach.
“This has been a great learning platform for college students like us, who are passionate about data and enjoy number crunching. We focused on encrypting the database application, to help build data security. We had a lot of guidance from the dunnhumby data experts who were present and the day was very well organised. It’s been fun!” added Abhishek Sharma, a student participant.
After 10 hours of hacking, number crunching, intense discussion the winners were finally announced amid reverberating applause. Abhishek Sharma, Archit Gupta and Gaurav Anand were announced as the runner-ups, with Jaydeep Chakraborty, Raghav Shantanu and Gurleen Sabharwal taking the winners title.