Students from all over the country came to AIB Bankcentre in Ballsbridge to take part in the first ever AIB Datahon, a full day of working on a dataset to build a predictive model. The winners were brothers Sam and Jeremy Boles . Sam studies Computer Science in DIT and Jeremy studies Commerce in UCD.

On the day, students were asked to create a movie recommendation model based on 100,000 movie ratings from 1,000 users. The challenge was to build a movie recommendation system that would deploy similar techniques to Netflix or Amazon, such as “You may also like”. Participants were free to approach the problem in whatever way they choose.

Students travelled from from University College Dublin, Dublin City University, Trinity College Dublin, University College Cork, NUI – Galway, NUI – Maynooth, Dublin Institute of Technology, Blanchardstown Institute of Technology, Cork Institute of Technology and Letterkenny Institute of Technology.

It was the first time the brothers had competed in this type of competition but they would be very interested in entering more competitions “if they prizes are like this” said Sam.

“I had no idea what to expect,” said Jeremy. “I had a module on this last year and I really enjoyed it. The Datathon has really showed me that it is possible to pursue a career in this field.”

Bernard Byrne was delighted to be able to present the winning team with €4,000 worth of tech equipment.

Seamus Murphy, Chief Data Officer at AIB said “We were really impressed by the quality of the teams competing today. AIB hosted the Datathon to give Irish graduates an insight into our work at AIB and show case how we use to data to best understand what the customer needs and thus provide the best possible service.”

“The function of the Data team at AIB has changed a lot in the last two years. We have hired people from a variety of academic backgrounds from computer science and astrophysics and have broadened the scope of work across the bank. We would hope to see many of the great competitors we saw today, applying for our 2015 graduate programme.”