History of ASA DataFest
ASA DataFest was founded at UCLA in 2011, when 30 students gathered for 48 intense hours to analyze five years of arrest records provided by the Los Angeles Police Department. ASA DataFest is now sponsored by the American Statistical Association and hosted by colleges and universities across the country. More than 2000 students take part in the over 60 competitions hosted from late March to early May..
A key feature of ASA DataFest is that it brings together the data science community. Undergraduate students do the work, but they are assisted by roving consultants who are graduate students, faculty, and industry professionals. Many professionals find ASA DataFest to be a great recruiting opportunity as they get to watch talented undergraduate students work under pressure in a team and examine their thinking processes.
After two days of intense data wrangling, analysis, and presentation design, each team is allowed five minutes and no more than two slides to impress a panel of judges.
2025 ASA DataFest with ASU and UofA
During the weekend of April 4-6, 2025, we hosted ASA DataFest, the annual international undergraduate data analysis/data hackathon competition of the American Statistical Association.
ASA DataFest was hosted across the state of Arizona in a hybrid format (both in person local and virtual): in person here at ASU in the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (SoMSS), in person in Tucson at University of Arizona Department of Mathematics, and online with virtual students.
We had 214 students participate in the weekend’s competition. In terms of where they competed, we had 124 here in person at SoMSS, 28 in Tucson at UA, and 62 online (mix of both ASU and UA students). We had 47 teams total, with 27 ASU in person, 7 UA in person, and 13 virtual (photo below is opening night of ASU competitors).
Of the 185 ASU students who competed, 112 were SoMSS majors (108 data science), 51 computer science majors (with some minoring in our data science program), and 22 of various other majors (with some minoring in our data science program).
The teams had 48 hours to find and share meaning in a large, rich and complex data set. This year’s challenge asked students to analyze commercial office leasing data post-COVID, provided by Savills, with a focus on tech, financial service and legal service industries.
The teams were split into two panels for judging, and each panel announced winners in three categories. We are proud to share that our ASU teams earned four of the six prize categories! With all the hurdles that a hackathon produces, each student showed great resilience and determination to make it to the end. Kudos to all the competitors!
Congratulations to the winning teams! (ASU teams in bold and pictured above)
PANEL A
Best Visualization Award
Team VICEY (UofA)
Leinah V. Cazeau
Ira Puranik
Elizabeth Hiebert
Xiaoying Zhao
Cameron Wick
Best Insight Award
Team X-Bar Craft (UofA)
Jonathan Barry
Daniel Huang
Alden Gregory
Fatih Yılmaz
Judges’ Choice Award
NECM Innovators (ASU)
Noah McLeod
Evan Stringer
Christian Thompson
Matthew Salvador
PANEL B
Best Visualization Award
+84 (ASU)
Ngoc Tran
Linh Luong
Long Cap
Dat Phung
Best Insight Award
The Data Task Force (ASU)
Mannan Anand
Fawaz Ali
Abhi Chandra Yayi
Saiqa Nawaz
Judges’ Choice Award
Vibrance (ASU)
Jaanvi Malik
Anshul Kumar
We want to sincerely thank our sponsors for their generous support:
SoMSS, Rodney Jee and USAA.
Special thanks to ASA DataFest Organizing Committee members:
From ASU – Marko Samara, Sabiha Mahzabeen, Rhonda Olson, Gabriela Burnett
From UA – Helen Zhang, Lianfen Qian (and earlier Tierra Stimpson)
From ASA Arizona Chapter and USAA – Rodney Jee
Thanks for technical support from Tushar Dhakad and Luis Gutierrez.
Thank you to our esteemed judges, including ASU and UA faculty, and industry representatives from Banner Health, Nordstrom, Inari Medical, TransUnion, and Etsy.
We also want to thank the many mentors who helped guide the students, both in person and virtually, throughout the weekend – including many of you from SoMSS, and representatives from UA, Amazon, MUFG, Deloitte, Aeris, Los Alamos National Lab, University of Michigan, and Foxbat Consulting Services.