Oklahoma State students take top honors at Teradata 2015 PARTNERS Conference

Friday, October 30, 2015

OSU group at Teradata 2015 PARTNERS Conference — From left, Bryan Hammer, Kewa (Jeffrey) Mei, Jacob Pearson, Katja Siamionava and Ramesh Sharda celebrate the OSU team's top prize for best analytics project at the Teradata 2015 PARTNERS Conference and Expo.

A team representing Oklahoma State University’s Spears School of Business won the overall prize for best business analytics project at the Teradata 2015 PARTNERS Conference and Expo Oct. 18-22 in Anaheim, Calif.

Kewa (Jeffrey) Mei, a former OSU master’s student; Jacob Pearson, master’s student in management information systems, and Katja Siamionava, master’s student in hotel and restaurant administration, were the winning team with their project, “Hotel Occupancy Rates vs. Online Reviews.”

“It is especially heartening to have an Oklahoma State University team win recognition in this competition,” said Ramesh Sharda, vice dean of the OSU Watson Graduate School of Management and executive director of Teradata University Network. “We had teams competing from Australia, Thailand and many other U.S. schools, so having an OSU team win in the contest is very special.”

The OSU team’s project focused on the process of travelers using online reviews to assist in the selection of their hotel. But what’s not understood is what aspect of the reviews influence travelers to stay in hotels. Data was pulled from Expedia, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Booking.com and other travel websites using text-mining processes and analysis was performed to better understand how reviews influence hotel occupancy rate.

Using a decision tree and neural network, positive emotions, attitudes, and feelings were found to increase occupancy rate while negative sentiment about price and cost decreased occupancy rate.

Jacob Pearson is interviewed about OSU's winning project at the Teradata 2015 PARTNERS Conference and Expo.

“This group represented the University well, Many industry attendees told me the quality of their work was as good as other professionals presenting at the conference,” said Bryan Hammer, advisor for the OSU students and assistant professor of management science and information systems.

Teradata 2015 PARTNERS is the preeminent conference regarding every aspect of data. It’s where business, marketing and technology leaders meet to learn and share the latest strategies and tactics for optimizing their company’s use of data.

Teradata University Network (TUN) has more than 3,000 faculty from over 1,600 universities in 90 countries, and includes thousands of student users.