Hackathon 2021

MSc Big Data and Business Analytics Hackathon 2021
From the 15^th to 19^th of March

Michelin, Criteo and ESCP organised a Hackathon on the theme of IoT and connected society with emerging GDPR regulation

For the fourth edition of the MSc in Big Data and Business Analytics’ annual Hackathon, students worked on four real-life cases with Michelin and Criteo. Students were challenged to find novel business models and analytical solutions with emerging IoT technologies in the connected society that was facing new GDPR regulations. Twenty-one teams had four days to leverage their technical and business skills to come up with creative solutions to the cases. The fifth day of the Hackathon was reserved for pitching the ideas to a jury!

Four Real-Life Cases

Michelin: Tyre Mining Maintenance

Tire maintenance is crucial in the mining industry, and productivity relies on tires that carry extremely heavy loads, over rough terrain, every day. As part go this project, students had to create a new business for Michelin Consulting & Services, combining existing data (and new data sources) and providing new and relevant KPI’s for tire maintenance management.

The winning team’s solution is a mobile-based application that provides the maintenance manager with all relevant information regarding a tire’s maintenance on one centralised platform. The key feature of the application is the tire’s health monitor, an indicator of the remaining useful life of a tire, which the team developed using machine learning. In addition, the students leveraged the data at hand by providing meaningful insights through dashboards and KPIs integrated within the application.

Michelin: Track Connect

Michelin Track Connect (MTC) is an application that helps circuit drivers achieve their optimal driving performance. The goal of this project was for students to answer three key questions: In what ways can MTC be monetised? What should the growth strategy for MTC be? How can MTC monetise its data assets?

The winning team proposed three ideas. The first is to develop a dangerous driving risk alert, which could detect crashes and dangerous driving behaviour in real-time. The second idea is to sell insurance packages for race-day events through the MTC app by partnering with insurance partners. The third proposal involves providing insurance companies with data from MTC users to help them increase the accuracy of their risk assessment models.

Michelin: Truckfly

The Truckfly application supports truckers throughout their journey. Amongst other features, it provides truckers with up-to-date information on where to refuel, eat and rest along their route. For this case, students had to think of ways to grow/pivot Truckfly’s business and generate stable revenues.

The winning team delivered a Competitive Analytics Dashboard where business owners and business managers can gain a competitive advantage given the exclusivity and granularity of Truckfly’s data assets. This Competitive Analytics Dashboard offers real-time data analytics about the industry and regional competitors, the trucker customer segments, and also, the main characteristics a business should have to maintain attractiveness and visibility in the market. All of this is possible by implementing statistical and machine learning algorithms, such as clustering, random forests, forecasting and market basket analysis.

Criteo: Contextual targeting

There is increasing pressure to limit the online tracking of users. Thus, the advertising ecosystem is shifting towards contextual targeting. As part of this Criteo case, students were challenged to design a contextual targeting product to connect advertisers to publishers and reach users (using limited user data).

The winning team used keyword matching to categorise and assign advertisers with relevant publishers. It also drew data from multiple other sources, like Google Trends, to enhance the matching process.

ESCP Business School - MSc in Big Data and Business Analytics - Hackathon 2021: The jury, made up of ESCP professors, Michelin representatives, tech partners and Spinfi members, awarded a prize for each of the three subject areas.

The jury, made up of ESCP professors, Michelin representatives, tech partners and Spinfi members, awarded a prize for each of the three subject areas.

Michelin Cases: Winning Teams

1^st Prize Michelin and 1^st Prize Truckfly: Noelia Venet, Francisco Javier Leiton Jimenez, Liwa Aboumrad, Zoe Le
1^st Prize Tyre Mining Maintenance: Luis Vasconcelos, Xavier Campagne, Tony Achkar, Anthony Daye
1^st Prize Track Connect: Mouaad Benelhirche, Ugo Carotti, Edoardo Maschio, Edoardo Tarallo
1^st Prize Academic winner: Simon Probst, Alexander Lund, Leonardo Nespolon, Nicolaus Norden

Criteo Cases: Winning Teams

1^st Prize: Fanrui Lian, Annie Chien, Alex Melennec, Yun Zhang
2^nd Prize: Marie-Isabelle Schönborn, Chiara Höppner, Florian Drummen, Youssef Braham
3^rd Prize: Cassandre Sillere, Edoardo Brizi, Guillermo Rubio Lopez, Yiyu Chen

Jury Members

Michelin

Benjamin Levrard
Sebastien Masseret
Gregoire Rosay
Caroline Wies
Martin Journois
Yohan Benque
Ramya Gajula
Jean Dejonghe

Criteo

Laurent Molter
Camille Lehujeur

Spinfi

Stephane Alix

ESCP Business School

Prof. Howard Zhong
Prof. Louis-David Benyayer
Prof. Wei Zhou

ESCP Business School - MSc in Big Data and Business Analytics - Hackathon 2021: Students at Work

Students Testimonials

“The Criteo Hackathon was a unique opportunity to leverage our data analysis skills to face an emerging issue concerning data privacy on the internet. Within a week, in teams of four, we created a solution using Natural Language Processing and Neural networks to identify the best advertiser for an online publisher in compliance with the GDPR and CCPA. This experience was exciting and very formative in terms of teamwork, analytics and problem-solving skills. It definitively gave me more confidence for future challenges in business analytics!”

Youssef Braham

“ The Michelin Hackathon was an amazing experience that allowed us to apply our knowledge and put the data at the service of real business objectives! Our team developed a solution to offer a competitive advantage to Truckfly’s clients, based on real-time and granular data. We were very happy to bring value to Michelin and are definitely excited for future data challenges!”

Noelia Venet

“ The Hackathon was an exciting opportunity to apply our business and technical knowledge to a real-world problem. Despite the challenges posed by Covid, our team which was partially on campus and partially remote worked incredibly well together! We really enjoyed the project and learned a lot about the advertising industry, model building and teamwork!”

Chiara Hoppner

Campuses

Paris

Hackathon 2020

Escp’s Msc in Big Data and Business Analytics Organised Its Annual Hackathon for the Third Year Running!

Paris

Reinventing work and shaping the future of digital leadership

8 groups of MiM students involved to crack 8 key topics in the headlines

8 hot topics

Defining a new value proposition for the office
Leading a co-rpo-working space
Leading a different workforce (free-lancers, slashers, platform workers…)
Leading in a hybrid environment (teleworkers & non-teleworkers in the same team)
Leading virtual teams
HR decision-making via artificial intelligence
Integrating newcomers in a remote environment
Developing/maintaining social bonding remotely

This challenge is the final step of a 30-hour course delivered by Professor Emmanuelle Léon, Scientific Director of the Reinventing Work Chair.
“The Reinventing Work chair is an ecosystem where managers, professors and students work together in order to better understand the changes at hand in the organizations. This course has been designed in partnership with the different members of the jury, some of whom shared their experiences and knowledge with the students during class. It is through these continuous interactions between research and real-life challenges that we will be able to move forward. Designing a video, writing an executive summary and confronting their points of views with the jury’s have raised the students’ awareness of today’s real life challenges”, she explains.

To assess the students’ achievements, a panel of experts were Jury members. We warmly thank Géraldine Conti, Head of HR for International Retail Banking, BNP Paribas ; Olivier Cros, Head of Workplace Strategy, CBRE France ; Ulysse Dorioz, Director of the transformation, Conseil Régional d’Ile-de-France ; Maud Lesieur, Upskilling programme Leader, BivwAk! ; Claire Maldera, Head of HR for Wealth Management, BNP Paribas ; Frédéric Thoral, Head of HR for Personal Finance, BNP Paribas ; Dominique Turcq, President, Boostzone Institute ; Arnaud Weiss, Co-founder and CEO, @Axel.

Each group took the “e-floor” for 10 minutes to present a 3-min video pitching their recommendation and to answer questions from Jury members.
Two groups have been awarded:

“Leading virtual teams”
Congratulations to Elèonore Andries, Wilhelm Bingsmark, Davide Castellano, Yu-Ning Lee and Swetha Sindhu Nair

Learn more about their findings

Remote work and virtual teams are on the rise, and the current pandemic has only accelerated their advent. For companies to be able to adapt to such ways of working, they need to learn and comprehend how to leverage such experiences, and team leaders need to understand how to successfully manage a team of people who are not physically together. We investigated how virtual teams should be built and which leadership practices that managers should adapt in order to guarantee the success of a virtual team. What exactly is a virtual team? A virtual team is a group of people working together towards a common goal, but it does so from different geographical regions. From a managerial perspective, leading a virtual team means to harmonize and manage communication amongst colleagues spread across the world, and to ensure the success of the team’s operations. Through trust, clarity and vision (Forbes, 2015), virtual team members are able to work together as one in order to achieve common goals. However, there are additional factors which play significant roles in the accomplishment of a virtual team’s objectives, such as people’s personality traits, behaviors, and preferences. It is worth mentioning that leading a virtual team and virtually leading a team are two different things which must not be confused. We based our work on literature analysis on the topic and on interviews conducted with three different people from diverse environments, namely the business and academia. To ensure the reliability and validity of our research, we used a standardized interview guide regarding the possible challenges and benefits of virtual teams to all of our interviewees. Our first interviewee was Dr. Paul Caussat, Professor at ESCP Business School, whose experience from almost a year of virtual teaching provided him with valuable insights on how best to deal with virtual teams in an educational context. Secondly, we reached out to an Amazon’s employee. Her insights on how to lead virtual teams were interesting that she has had a longstanding experience of remote work, even before the pandemic. Lastly, we had the opportunity to interview Ms. Barbara Chen, the President of AGORA, a platform made by and dedicated to ESCP students, representing more than 6,000 of them over all six campuses, which allowed us to gain a managerial perspective in the school ecosystem. We can see that though our interviewees valued different aspects and factors in the success of leading virtual teams, most of the insights we gained from them highly coincide with our research findings collected. The success of a virtual team relies not merely on the leadership role, but also key traits, such as diversity a team shall possess, along with co-created norms to which all the team members shall respect.
Source: Executive summary of the students group

“Integrating newcomers in a remote environment”
Congratulations to Fiona Deodato, Viktoria Leroux, Ribal Moujaes, Marvin Ulbrich and Julie Zimmermann

Learn more about their findings

Integration refers to a sense of healthy fit between employees and employers, to maximize the overall performance of the company to reach a specific goal and to help with building sustainable interpersonal relationships. It is important to point out that integration is about adaptation, and humans are capable of adapting to any environment, but of course this ability to adapt varies depending on the quality of support provided.
Effective integration within a workplace relies on two aspects, which are usually complementary (Arshavskiy, 2019):
An informal aspect -This aspect is usually done to emotionally engage the new hire, and transmit a sense of culture. It is usually acquired through more user friendly mechanisms.
A formal aspect -The onboarding process, which is done to formally integrate and introduce the new hire into the company, giving them full access to the company’s tools and resources.
Effectively transmitting a company’s culture is the first step and vital to integrate new employees well. An important aspect is that culture is a unique asset of a company that cannot be copied, and helps employees get a sense of belonging and identity.
Newcomers place more and more emphasis on being aligned with the organization’s values and beliefs, and it is important to ensure such alignment as soon as the contract has been signed. This will help with creating an overall team cohesion, maximizing employee engagement and retention, and with the overall performance of the company.
Furthermore, onboarding is vital to increase employer branding but also to give candidates an overall idea of the companies’ culture and work environment. Indeed, as highlighted by Amy Hirsh Robinson, principal of the consulting firm The Interchange Group, onboarding is “the perfect time to tell stories about the organization's history, values, people and big-picture vision for the future".
Onboarding was a critical factor in a successful workforce integration strategy even before the Corona crisis. Now,rapid digitization of the integration of new hires has been made inevitable by the pandemic. Our research draws a first conclusion from the implementation of integration processes in the virtual environment, putting the established formal and informal onboarding process to the test through a qualitative approach.
Our research indicates that the best practices of the invoked onboarding process continue to hold in large part. Interestingly, the "warm first day" and the "welcoming days" merge into one best practice, which may be due to the absence of building tours and hardware setup that are common during the on-site introduction. A key component that can be seen across all interviews and aspects of our study is the importance of clear and frequent communication, whether formal or informal, to be able to create transparency and a personal relationship.
Without sufficient communication, it is also not possible to transmit company values and corporate culture to the newcomers, which is essential for a smooth onboarding and long lasting integration.
Source: Executive summary of the students group

Campuses

Paris

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Newly transitioned e-leaders in the COVID-19 virtual team context

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