UmojaHack Africa Decoded: Expert Advice and Untold Secrets for Succeeding in the Most Epic Machine Learning Hackathon for Students
Hello and thank you for visiting today. I will describe the most epic machine learning hackathon for both undergraduate and postgraduate students across the continent. I will give advice on how to get ready for the hackathon, how to tackle the challenges, how to stand out from the competitors, what it takes to win the hackathon, and finally, I will offer examples of past UmojaHack Africa winners.
About UmojaHack Africa:
UmojaHack Africa is Africa’s largest inter-university machine learning hackathon, taking place this year on 18–19 March 2023 at universities all over the continent. Students of all levels are encouraged to participate in a weekend of learning and fun, interact with other students and learn about career options in data science, and stand a chance to win $10 000 USD in prizes.
This event is special for all data enthusiast students across the continent, With an interest in taking their Data Science and Machine Learning experiences to the extra mile.
Kudos to Zindi Africa and the sponsors of this event from 2020, which took place for the first time, as it will commemorate the fourth occurrence in 2023. The event always has three kinds of competitions, for three levels of understanding in the data science field:
- Beginner challenge: this challenge is especially for data enthusiast students with less than 1 year of experience in data science. You can even join with no experience at all!
- Intermediate challenge: This challenge is especially for data enthusiast students with 1–2 years of experience in data science and machine learning.
- Advanced challenge: This challenge is especially for data enthusiast students with 2+ years of experience in data science and machine learning.
Nice! now you are aware of the most epic event, Let’s jump right in to explore more about tips for success.
Tips for Success: How to Ace the Biggest Machine Learning Hackathon for Students
Participating in a data science and machine learning hackathon can be a great opportunity to showcase your skills, learn from others, and potentially win a prize. Here are the tips for success in UmojaHack
- Get yourself familiar with data science and machine learning: You should understand that data science is not about tools. Instead is all about solving problems by improving performance, reducing risks, etc by the means of data. Understand the steps for solving challenges with data science and machine learning then master the process by doing practice and learning from existing solutions.
- Get a fully registered Zindi Account: fill out your details-Including University-Get familiar with the platform it is really important.
- Set a goal: what do you want to achieve from Umojahack like winning prizes, connecting with brilliant minds from other countries, Exploring New techniques in data cleaning and analysis, Validate your problem-solving skills may be in supervised machine learning challenges or Unsupervised ones? This is really important because you will be running at your own pace rather than feeling frustrated with others during the challenge
- Try to solve the existing challenges on the zindi platform which are related to or similar to your goals if you aiming to win experience matters nothing comes without a hustle so I beg you to try really harder. Enroll challenge, build a solution, and submit your solution for evaluation, by doing so you will have confidence and no more surprises or stack during the hackathons.
- Prepare yourself in terms of the conducive environment during the hackathon day, data bundle for downloading data, submissions, searching for resources, and getting updates about the hackathon. All is to ensure your mind will be settled during the hackathon and you will focus on building the solution nothing more.
- Get better at problem understanding, data cleaning, analysis, and feature engineering, this will help you to figure out what are the key patterns of coming up with the right model for the challenge at hand. Not get surprised at the end of the hackathon the algorithms of the winners and yours are the same only the difference starts with problem understanding, data preparation, and selecting the best features.
- Plan your approach: Develop a plan for tackling the problem. Break the problem into smaller, more manageable parts and identify which techniques you will be using at each part. Explore best Machine Learning techniques for analysis, preprocessing, Model selection, and boosting model performances such as feature engineering, Hyperparameter tuning, data augmentations, cross-validation, and Ensemble methods techniques such as bagging, boosting, and stacking can be used to improve the accuracy and robustness of the model depending on the nature of the task at hand.
- Get familiar with cloud environments like Google collab, and Kaggle Kernel this will help in making the smooth journey of building amazing solutions. Be accountable for the limitations of those cloud platforms in case you run out of usage you can consider paying or using a different account to backup or consider having a team so that within a team alternatives will be available.
- Instead of doing a challenge solely consider having a team: Not a must but if you think is the best option for you why not use it? Solving a challenge in a team of up to 4 students will help to combine you are ideas, connect with people, and make awesome progress in your data science journey.
- Remember to keep track of your submissions by naming them well with words that can help you to remember what techniques you applied to come out with that submission this is important for winners when it comes to submitting your source codes.
- Consider documenting your solution right after the hackathon this will be the best way to reflect on what you have achieved in terms of experience, and impact your writing and reporting skills as well. You can write an article to share about the challenge approach, update your resume, create well documented GitHub repository, and post your solution. Small things really matter in your career journey so don’t wait for huge opportunities only.
Untold Secrets about UmojaHack Africa:
- About Winning prizes: Winners announcement is done on the second day just 30 min after the hackathon. Winning prizes-top winners per challenge up to three, Chances of Winning from the Country level this is different from the challenge level, Teams are allowed within the University level you can’t combine with students from different universities or countries.
- About Submissions and Leaderboard: You will be having 50 limited submissions per day(may change depending on the challenge guidelines). The final leaderboard will reveal the winners, and understand the difference between public and private leaderboards here. Zindi will select the best-performing submission from the public leaderboard for evaluation on the private leaderboard but you can select up to 4 submissions to be considered as your final solutions before the end of the hackathon and zindi will use those to evaluate in the private leaderboard.
- Solutions Validation: Zindi Will Send an email just after the announcement to submit your solution for evaluation the email will have all guidelines including the specific time failure to do so will be disqualified, If your submitted codes didn’t produce the results on the leaderboard also you will be disqualified.
- Having Multiple Accounts: It is not allowed to have multiple accounts any suspicion of doing this will be burned out from using the zindi platform for the specified time.
- About Participation Certificate: Every participant receives a participation certificate from Zindi, which details their standing on the hackathon scoreboard and the challenge’s objectives.
- Opportunities after UmojaHack: UmojaHack winner has higher chances to connect with Sponsors which is really amazing.
Previous UmojaHack Events as Case Studies:
- UmojaHack Africa 2020: attracted students from 56 universities in 15 African countries competed for cash prizes, and seized the opportunity to collaborate and hone their machine learning skills. Almost $10,000 in prizes to winners and their universities were distributed by Zindi Africa. Explore more about challenges and solutions from winning teams from this link.
- UmojaHackAfrica 2021: attracted students from 126 universities in 21 African countries competed for cash prizes, and seized the opportunity to collaborate and hone their machine learning skills. Almost $20,000 in prizes to winners and their universities were distributed by Zindi Africa. Explore more about challenges and solutions from winning teams from this link.
- UmojaHack Africa 2022: attracted students from 300 universities in 30 African countries competed for cash prizes, and seized the opportunity to collaborate and hone their machine learning skills. Explore more about challenges and solutions from winning teams from this link. Source codes from winners are posted here.
Final Thoughts:
No one cares about the tools you have used to succeed in the hackathon, people care about the problem you have solved how innovative and creative are you? Can you explore what is the potential of your solution? To what extent you have solved the challenge? etc
Data is the foundation of any machine learning project. Spend time understanding the data and ensuring that it is clean and well-structured. Identify the features that are most relevant to the problem you are trying to solve.
Remember to have fun! Hackathons are a great way to meet new people, learn new skills, and work on interesting problems. Enjoy the experience and try to learn as much as possible.
All the best in the coming umojaHack, get ready to bring solutions to African challenges. Ciao.
