Oklahoma State grad students top winners at Teradata 2016 PARTNERS Conference

Friday, September 23, 2016

Taradata winning team from OSU — Bhargav Molaka (second from left) and Samsheel Kathuri (far right) receive congratulations from Susan Baskin with Teradata and Ramesh Sharda, advisor for the OSU team.

A two-person team representing Oklahoma State University’s Spears School of Business was recently recognized as the overall winner of the 2016 Teradata Analytics Challenge.

OSU graduate students Samsheel Kathuri and Bhargav Molaka, master’s students in management information systems in Spears Business, were the overall winners with their project, “Health Analytics on Tobacco Use Disorders” at the Teradata 2016 PARTNERS Conference Sept. 11-15 in Atlanta.

It is the second consecutive year that an OSU team was the overall winner for the best business analytics project at the conference.

“It is especially heartening to have an Oklahoma State University team win recognition this competition for the second year in a row,” said Ramesh Sharda, advisor for the OSU team, vice dean of the OSU Watson Graduate School of Management and executive director of Teradata University Network. “We had teams competing from Australia, Canada, Singapore, Thailand and many schools from across the United States, so having an OSU team win in the contest is very special.”

Kathuri and Molaka’s project is aimed at helping hospitals reduce their readmission penalty. Their approach was to analyze patient’s path using Teradata Aster Npath and build statistical models that help to predict readmission rates. The uniqueness of this analysis is to consider the co-morbidity effect by building disease networks using Aster cFilter and including the network measures in the models.

OSU MIS graduate students Samsheel Kathur and Bhargav Molaka.

“Being selected as a finalist gave us the opportunity to attend the conference and present our project to all the industry leaders,” said Molaka. “This was a great chance to network, meet the people from our field and get to know how we could improve our skills to meet the industry needs. Winning the challenge against many other universities from all over the globe boosted our confidence. We are thankful to the professors from MIS department for helping us achieve this.”

The goal of the Analytics Challenge is to provide students with an opportunity to present their business analytics research or application cases to professionals in the business analytics community.

“We are very excited that Bhargav Molaka and Samsheel Kathuri were declared the overall winners at the TUN Analytics Challenge," said Rathin Sarathy, graduate coordinator of the OSU master's in management information systems program. "It is a reflection of the quality of students that we attract, as well as the strong efforts of our MS-MIS program faculty in providing a very high-quality educational experience for the students.

"Awards like these generally have a lasting impact on the careers of the winners. Our congratulations to Bhargav and Samsheel and our thanks to the Teradata University Network for organizing the competition," said Sarathy.

Teradata PARTNERS is the premier, customer-led global data conference. For five days PARTNERS brings together 6,000 of the world’s most advanced data and analytics experts and business leaders. They come from top brands across industries and every role in the enterprise to discuss, share, and discover how to drive more value from data.

Teradata University Network (TUN) has more than 5,000 faculty members from over 2,500 universities in 117 countries, and includes thousands of student users.