Jigsaw Academy Announces the Winners of the ValueLabs Data Analysis Competition

BANGALORE, India - Feb. 24, 2015 - PRLog -- Last month www.jigsawacademy.com rolled out an exciting Data Analysis competition for their students in collaboration with Value Labs, a global IT services company.

The objective of the project was to see if the company could use the Sentiment Score derived from the comments section in their feedback form sent to clients to predict the recommended score. The participating students were given a spreadsheet that had data spanning four years. There was no limitation on the tools that students can use, though it was preferred they use open source like R/Python.

“In the initial round we received thirty approach note submissions, out of which eight were shortlisted and asked to present final presentations. Jigsaw faculty reviewed the same and further narrowed the list to six. These submissions were then sent to ValueLabs and they selected three winners.” Says Sarita Digumarti co founder of Jigsaw Academy.

The winners are Rajesh Peruri, Rajanikar Kumar and Priyadarshini Chidambaram.

“All three are strong at making a compelling case, carrying out meaningful data analysis and feature engineering, using simple yet elegant models and lastly tying the results back to business. The three finalists used simpler models but always kept the business person in mind, which at the end of the day makes or breaks a project“, spokesperson for ValueLabs.

To acknowledge the effort put in by them, ValueLabs will be sending them a “Certificate of Merit” and they will also be given a “Recommendation letter”

Rajesh Peruri, a student of the Big Data with R, November 2014 batch is a semiconductor professional with an M.S. degree, who says his love for numbers and analytical reasoning piqued his curiosity in Data Analytics. Having followed it over the last few years, he has now become an ardent fan and believes that it is going to be the next big wave.

“The corporate project was a great learning opportunity for me — recapping the concepts I learnt in the Jigsaw Academy course, venturing into the territory of Sentimental Analysis, analyzing the data from various perspectives, drawing meaningful insights from my analyses and finally marrying all of these within the realms of the business problem at hand. It is indeed a confidence booster and an inspiration to have my efforts rewarded in this manner.”, Rajesh Peruri.

Rajanikar Kumar from the August 2014 Data Science with R course is a Senior Software Quality Analyst in Software Paradigms Infotech (SPI). He has a PGDM in Operations for SDMIMD, Mysore and Production Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and has published 3 National/International Papers and participated in other analytic activities, which he really enjoys.

“The solution for the Project was based on Text Analytics which was completely new to me. I took some time to learn the concept of text analytics/Sentiment analysis before I could start working on the project. In total, I found it very interesting and challenging and spent significant energy and time to come up with the solution. Thanks to Jigsaw for giving this opportunity to me.”, Rajanikar Kumar

Priyadarshini Chidambaram joined the Data Science with R course in October 2014. She is an IT Analyst with 5yrs of experience in 3 different industries- Education, Logistics & Banking and has extensive experience working in projects using Oracle PL/SQL, MS SQL, UNIX and ColdFusion.

“I had a great experience working on this project. Working on the jigsaw assignments during the course, really made the difference. It helped me to keep the objective in mind and approach the problem in a systematic way and achieve the final goal. Winning this gave me a new confidence that I can do well in my analytics career.”, Priyadarshini.

Team Jigsaw is very proud of all the participants and the hard work they have put in. We thanks ValueLabs for collaborating with us. We hope that giving our students the added opportunity to work on real life business problems, will enhance their confidence and experience and give them an edge in their careers.

Congrats again to the winners!