The Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa (DIRISA) will be hosting their first annual Student Datathon Competition. The primary role of DIRISA is to enable, promote and support data intensive research across all scholarly disciplines. The Student Datathon Competition aims to promote data intensive research.

Purpose

The DIRISA student datathon is a competition that is organised by the Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa (DIRISA) to showcase how open research data can be used to come up with creative and innovative solutions to some of South Africa’s problems.

Objectives

– To give students an opportunity to learn about the benefits of open data.
– To showcase innovative solutions using open data.
– To find new solutions to problems.
– To advocate for the use of open data.

Planned Programme

DIRISA Workshop

During the DIRISA workshop on 2-4 July there will be training that is aimed at introducing the students to basic concepts of data science, research data management and Python/R skills. After this training, the students will be given challenges every month that they need to complete and submit to the DIRISA team in preparation for the competition in December.

CHPC Conference

The DIRISA Student Datathon Competitionwill be held in December (dates and venue to be confirmed) as part of the CHPC Conference.