Students apply analytical skills to solve real-world problems

At the annual Higher Education Analytics Data (HEAD) Competition hosted by Mohawk College, college and university students are invited to test their analytical skills and storytelling abilities by exploring a real-world problem based on available data. No special programming or analytical tool knowledge is required, but students studying Data Analytics or related fields will have an advantage.

Teams compete with one another and may employ a variety of descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive analytics techniques to analyze problems with data. Using any technology and supporting data sets they identify, teams are to prepare and model data to perform analysis used to make recommendations to key decision-makers. Teams will prepare a poster and deliver a presentation on their analysis in two phases of competition.

At the 2024 HEAD competition, students were asked to tackle the problem of Climate Change, specifically extreme weather events and how they effect assets held by the City of Hamilton. Through analytical data, students provided recommendations to the City on where their future investments should be prioritized in the coming years. In partnership with City Lab, using 80,000 pieces of data (less than expected due to the city cyber hack) 20 teams competed to find the solution.