North America Student Challenge 2024

Create | Solve | Innovate | Compete

The IEEE Computer Society North America Student Challenge provides a platform for students from all over North America to create innovative solutions to real-world big data problems. For this year’s competition, each student OR team (max. three students) is required to present a solution to a pre-determined problem/issue statement.

Potential Challenges

1. Computing infrastructure usage analysis. Analyze traces of usage of production computer clusters to predict certain patterns in unseen data.
2. LLM prediction power. Learn how to train an LLM to make accurate predictions.
3. Cloud computing workloads. Analyze a production cloud computing workload to predict what future workload patterns will look like.

Winning Teams will present their solutions at IEEE Big Data in Washington, DC, from 15-18 December 2024.

Submissions will be evaluated based on quantitative performance in predicting events in an unseen dataset, an oral presentation given by the teams to a team of international judges, and the novelty of the solution. The three winning teams will be awarded at IEEE Big Data, with expenses paid by the IEEE Computer Society.

Register yourself or your team today and test and showcase your skills against other students from around the world.

Reasons to Participate | Competition Rules | Prizes | Organizing Committee

Reasons to participate

• Showcase your technical skills.
• Exposure in front of an international team of judges
• Compete amongst a community of students with an interest in Computer Science and Engineering.

Competition Rules

The teams may use any resources at their disposal, though credit will be given for the novelty of the solution. Teams may not collaborate with other teams. The software submitted must be runnable in a Jupyter notebook.

Prizes

1st place finisher: US$2,500

First runner-up: US$1,500

Second runner-up: US$500

Special Prize for a team comprised solely of IEEE Computer Society Members.

Key Dates

Registration Open/Phase 1 Kicks Off:  16 September 2024, Deadline to Register, 4 October

Submission Deadline: 21 October 2024

Finalists Notified: 8 November 2024

Finalists Present In Person at IEEE Big Data: 16 December 2024

Winners Announced: 17 December 2024

Organizing Committee

Saurabh Bagchi, Purdue University

Chair

Deborah Silver, Rutgers University

Lead

Joaquim Jorge, University of Lisbon

Lead

Megha Ben, Siemens

Member

Kwabena Boateng, QuantizedFT

Member

Prasanth Mohan, QuestionPro Workforce

Member

Saptarshi Ghosh, Intel

Member

Preeti Mukherjee, Purdue University

Member

Technical Contributors

• Josh McKerracher, Aryamaan Dhomne, Purdue University
• Xiangliang Zhang, Xiangqi Wang, Yue Huang, University of Notre Dame
• Ashraf Mahgoub, General Motors