Two teams of SMU School of Information Systems (SIS) undergraduates were competing against IT professionals from around the world in the Urban Data Challenge 2013. What’s more, the professionals had been working on their entries for a month. The SIS teams had only two weeks to prepare when Associate Professor Kam Tin Seong , Faculty Head, SMU-SAS Advanced Analytics Lab, set entries as an end of term project. The result – one entry, “A City’s Heartbeat”, won Third Prize and the other, “Buzz Stop”, earned an Honourable Mention.

The Urban Data Challenge seeks to harvest the innovative and creative power of communities around the world to explore urban data sets through visualisation. Designers, programmers, data scientists, and artists alike are invited to take up the challenge: merge and compare mobility data sets from three cities—San Francisco, Geneva, and Zurich—and draw meaningful insights.

Max Xu MengZiang, who worked on “A City’s Heartbeat”, said his team members decided to take up the challenge because they thought it was an interesting problem to solve. In fact, they were already involved in different business start-ups in SMU’s BIG business incubator: Max Xu in Oompr!, Zi Xin Chong from Appic Technologies (creators of Ticktok) and Adrian Vu from TweetOutLoud. They thought that since they were going to spend such long hours in their incubators anyway, they should have no problems finding each other and working together.

Asked if they expected to do so well in the competition, Max admitted, “Honestly, no. We only had a two week period to implement the system and we spent a huge amount of our time working on our start-ups too so this ‘victory’ really came as a very pleasant surprise.”

Both teams expressed their gratitude to Professor Kam for mentoring them. Geoffrey Goh Koon Hui, who worked on “Buzz Stop” said, “Professor Kam was instrumental to our success. We worked with him closely during development and, at key decision points, we consulted him for his opinions and he gave us new things to consider. Then when we proposed our high level design to him, he gave his inputs and approval. A few days before the submission, we put up the link to our application on our course wiki, and he also gave us his comments and suggestions for improvement.”