21 Nov 2018
KUALA LUMPUR – Data Unchained Malaysia 2018, the country’s largest datathon hosted jointly by Axiata Group Berhad (Axiata) and Asia School Business (ASB) from 2-4 November 2018 in Kuala Lumpur ended on a high note with several teams and individuals clinching prizes for their data driven business pitches.
Data Unchained Malaysia 2018 marks Axiata and ASB’s inaugural collaboration aimed at providing a platform for top Malaysian talent, data scientists and enthusiasts to showcase their problem solving and data analytics skills in creating real impact on everyday lives of Malaysian citizens.
A total of 100 participants were selected from 300 registered applicants following a screening exercise. The participants were then placed into 24 teams for the competition. Each team consisted at least a business consultant, a data engineer and a data scientist. The data set was released on the first day following a brief on the problem statements. The participants were then required to analyse the data, generate insights, build their data model, visualisation and complete a business proposal for pitching within 24 hours. Out of 24 teams, the panel of judges selected the top 5 teams that would proceed to the final round to present their solutions.The prizes for the datathon were worth a total of RM37,000 for the team and individual categories.
For the team category, Innovation Squad, comprising members Ian Chu Te, Nadav Rindler, Fahad Ud Din and Loh Kai Syuen clinched the top spot, winning prizes worth RM10,000 for their pitch on Monetization models for IOT project that aimed to build the ecosystem, hardware premium, improve data and service revenue.
For the individual category, Ian Chu Te and Nadav Rindler were awarded the ‘Best Data Scientist’ award, winning prizes worth RM3,500, while Alvin Tan was awarded the ‘Best Data Engineer’ award, winning prizes worth RM3,500, Wyena Cheah and Elton Lee were awarded the ‘Best Business Consultant’ award.
Pedro Uria Recio
Axiata Analytics Centre Head
All 24 teams that participated in Data Unchained Malaysia 2018 competed intensely to deliver compelling business cases driven by data analytics within a short span of time. It was crucial for them to possess a good blend of technical and business skills to make an analytics team successful and I take this opportunity to congratulate the winners on their well-deserved success.
Big data and analytics facilitate higher quality decision-making and are increasingly becoming go-to tools for organisations that want to maintain their competitiveness and relevance in the market. This is driving greater demand for data scientists, data engineers and data-savvy business consultants everywhere in the world. It is with this in mind that Axiata collaborated with ASB to organise this datathon, which is aimed at nurturing and exposing a greater pool of specialists in this field both locally, and regionally.
Sean O’.Ferguson
Associate Dean & MBA Program Director for Asia School of Business
Asia School of Business has always aimed to play a part in contributing to this ecosystem and we believe that the Data Unchained Malaysia 2018 datathon had served as a great platform for talents to showcase their problem solving and insights generating skills.
Lewis Freiberg
Director of Ecosystem, IOTA Foundation
Axiata's Datathon was a tremendous success with each team approaching the problem statement a unique way. It was exciting to see how data science could be paired with new technologies and business models. The Datathon provided a perfect environment for teams to work on realistic datasets and have the opportunity to bake IOTA's DLT technology into their projects.
During the competition, participants were also able to gain insights from various experts, including those from the area of data science such as Professor Willem Smit from Asia School of Business, the Chairman of Data Analytics Group for TM Forum, Professor Paul Morrissey, the US Airforce Defense Innovation Unit’s Product Manager for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, Ryan Kappedal, the Chief Operating Officer from Dialog Axiata, Rainer Deutschmann and the Vice President of Business Intelligence from Robi Axiata Limited, Ahmed Saady Yaamin.
The event was supported by IOTA (Platinum Sponsor), Microsoft (Gold Sponsor) and Google Malaysia, Ericsson, TM Forum and Lynx Analytics which provided technical and knowledge support.
Yeoh TK
Participant at the Datathon
Being able to come up with innovative ideas is just part of the success story. The ability to show good and sustainable numbers elevate the quality of a business pitch and the datathon enabled us to demonstrate our skills in achieving this.
Oludare Oluwajuyitan
Participant and International Student from Asia School of Business
The event pushed individuals to do their best, past the boundaries of what was thought possible, as new markets, business opportunities and societal benefits were unlocked. At the end of the day, everybody is a winner.
Mok Zee Juin meanwhile was appreciative of the exposure gained during the competition as it enabled his team to benchmark themselves against other competitors, so they can come back better and stronger to win in future competitions.
About Axiata
Axiata is one of the leading telecommunications groups in Asia with approximately 350 million customers and with a presence in 11 countries. In pursuit of its vision to be the New Generation Digital Champion by 2021, the Group has transformed itself from a holding entity with a portfolio of pure-play mobile assets into a Triple Core Strategy driven business with the focus on Digital Telco, Digital Businesses and Infrastructure.
Within ASEAN and South Asia, Axiata has controlling stakes in market-leading mobile and fixed operators in the region including ‘Celcom’ in Malaysia, ‘XL’ in Indonesia, ‘Dialog’ in Sri Lanka, ‘Robi’ in Bangladesh, ‘Smart’ in Cambodia and 'Ncell' in Nepal. The Group also holds strategic interests in ‘Idea’ in India and ‘M1’ in Singapore. Axiata is in the cusp of transforming its mobile operations into Digital Telcos through digitisation and convergence.
‘edotco’, the Group’s infrastructure company, operates in six countries to deliver telecommunications infrastructure services, amassing approximately 27,500 towers. Presently the 12th largest independent tower companies globally, it aims to be one of the top regional telecommunications tower companies and is\ committed to responsible and sustainable business operations.
Axiata Digital and Axiata Business Services are the digital businesses arms of the Group. Together, these businesses are focused on capturing the rapid growth in digital financial services (‘Boost’), digital advertising (‘ada’), enterprise solutions/IoT (‘Xpand’) and platform services (‘APIgate’) with user access to global markets.
As a committed and long-term investor, Axiata provides employment to 25,000 people within its operations. In line with its sustainability goals, the Group actively supports and drives young talent development; disaster response and recovery; as well as green initiatives. Axiata’s broader goal Advancing Asia pieces together the best in the region in terms of innovation, connectivity and talent. For further information on Axiata visit www.axiata.com
About Asia School of Business
Asia School of Business (ASB) was established in 2015 by Bank Negara Malaysia in collaboration with MIT Sloan Management to be a premier global business school, a knowledge and learning hub infused with regional expertise, insights and perspectives of Asia and the emerging economies. ASB is committed to developing transformative and principled leaders who will contribute towards advancing the emerging world.
ASB currently offers a full-time MBA degree as its flagship program as well as several non-degreed executive education programs. www.asb.edu.my
About IOTA
IOTA is a revolutionary new transaction settlement and data transfer layer for the Internet of Things (IoT). It is based on a new distributed ledger technology, the Tangle, which overcomes the inefficiencies of current Blockchain designs and introduces a new way of reaching consensus in a decentralized peer-to-peer system. Using IOTA, for the first time ever, people and machines can transfer money and/or data without any transaction fees in a trustless, permissionless, and decentralized environment. This means that even nano-payments are possible without the need for a trusted intermediary of any kind.
IOTA is the missing puzzle piece for the Machine Economy to fully emerge and reach its true potential. IOTA is envisaged to be the public and permissionless backbone protocol for the IoT that enables true interoperability between all devices. IOTA currently focus on two things: transactional settlement (especially feeless and fast micropayments) and data integrity. With these two features a plethora of potential use cases are possible for the very first time. Real-time streaming payment services for data and energy, immutable data history tracking for supply chains, computational resource sharing (for bandwidth, CPU, and storage) and more, IOTA enables entire new business models which were previously impossible with the legacy financial system and other Distributed Ledger Technologies built on Blockchain.
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