Media Room

The NYP Team explaining their data analysis to DPM Teo Chee Hean. 

Four second-year Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP) students from the Diploma in Multimedia & Infocomm Technology recently took part in the National Science Experiment (NSE) Big Data Challenge. This competition connected students with scientists from A*STAR's Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) and the Singapore University of Technology and Design to come up with innovative applications of data collected in 2015 and 2016. The process exposed participants to data science including big data processing, use of data science tools and developing and testing hypotheses to draw meaningful insights from the data collected.

The challenge had two categories: one for secondary schools and a second one for junior colleges, polytechnics and the Institute of Technical Education. Participants had to gather meaningful insights on the behaviours of their fellow students by analysing a huge amount of data collected through sensors that these students wore for ten days.
 

From the data gathered, the NYP student team noticed an increasing number of physically-challenged students in the School of Engineering. These students would face difficulties getting from one class to another on different floors as the lifts are usually very packed in between classes. The four-member team developed an algorithm to derive the number of times a student had to travel to a different floor during inter-class periods based on changes in air pressure recorded by the sensors over time.
 

The team emerged second runner-up in the competition and received their prize from Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean. Team members also had the opportunity to explain to the DPM on their data analysis and he commented on the uniqueness of the team's work arising from concerns for physically-challenged students.