Sci-Tech Students Pitched Solutions for IE Sustainability Datathon partner Ryanair
The IE Sustainability Datathon has partnered with several industry leaders since its inception in 2022, including Ryanair and Acciona.
As part of IE School of Science and Technology’s mission to breakthrough silos separating industry and academia, students pitched solutions for airline Ryanair to be more sustainable and efficient in the closing ceremony of the IE Sustainability Datathon 2024.
The three-week data challenge required students to create models that accurately predicted the number of products sold during a flight ten days prior to its departure, thereby minimizing waste while maximizing the airline’s sales.
The winning team, Planet Pioneers, created a prediction model and proposed that tailored marketing would achieve Ryanair’s goal to be more sustainable.
Ryanair’s Chief Technology Officer, John Hurley, and adjunct professor Enrique García Otero formed the jury alongside Sci-Tech Dean Ikhlaq Sidhu and handed the winning teams their monetary prizes - €3000 for first place, €1500 for second, and €1000 for third.
Hurely praised the students’ work in addressing the airline’s sustainability goals.
“For these problems you need a lot of data and smart people. I look at you today and I see nothing but smart people,” he said.
Winning team member Antonia Murad, a Master of Business Analytics and Big Data student, said working with a real company made the Datathon a uniquely enriching experience.
“We’re extremely happy that we won. There were so many other amazing teams, and this experience has been amazing because we’re working with a real company and we were looking at their data, making predictions, trying to solve their problems not only from a technical side, but also a business side,” she said.
Sidhu applauded the participants and said that he likes datathons because they solve real problems, bridging gaps between students and industry experts.
“Some things that I really like about the datathons are, one is that you’re solving real problems, another is that we’re breaking silos,” he told the attendees.
Team Not Found and Team Cloud won the second and third place prizes respectively and used asymmetric loss functions along with logistic regression to develop their solutions.
The IE Sustainability Datathon partnered with Ryanair in 2022 when Sci-Tech students presented ways for the airline to reduce its planes’ weights, and hence their fuel consumption. IE School of Science and Technology opens up many opportunities for students to apply their classroom knowledge into real-world contexts. Earlier this semester, students from across different bachelor and master degrees collaborated in a three-day generative AI bootcamp where they developed startup ideas.