ASA DataFest Returns to Cal Poly

The 2025 “Best in Show” winners were the following Cal Poly students (from left to right): Tara Rajagopalan, Barbara Ibrahim, Charlotte Kuebitz and Kaviya Veerasingam.

April 2025 / NEWS STORY
by By Nick Wilson

DataFest was back at Cal Poly this spring and much bigger than last year.

The second in-person American Statistical Association (ASA) event, hosted by the Cal Poly Statistics Department on campus from April 4-6, included more than 80 students signed up and teams from two universities.

This year’s competition held in the university’s Advanced Technologies Laboratory included about 80 students, with 18 Cal Poly teams and two from CSU Monterey Bay. Last year, the event included 10 teams and 39 students, and just Cal Poly students participated.

The growing competition, similar to a hackathon, tasks student teams with using statistical methods to solve a dataset challenge over the course of a weekend in preparation for a Sunday afternoon presentation in front of judges.

Student teams worked together throughout the weekend
to present their work in front of a panel of judges.
Photo by Alexis Kovacevic.

Students said they enjoyed the learning and networking aspects of the event, including exploring the vast dataset they were required to analyze and deciphering how to tell a story from it.

“They have five minutes, three slides, to present, so it is very quick, and you have to efficiently communicate what you found in your story,” said Emily Robinson, a Cal Poly statistics faculty member and event co-coordinator. “A lot of students that participated last year told me that they talked about how the presentations helped in internship interviews.”

Winning teams included the following Cal Poly student competitors:

• Best in Show

Tara Rajagopalan, Barbara Ibrahim, Charlotte Kuebitz, Kaviya Veerasingam

• Best Visualization

Ruben Jimenez, Nick Patrick, Alex Yaun, Andrew Martinez

• Best Use of Outside Data 

Jett Palmer, Kaatje Matthews-vanKoetsveld, Libby Brill, Alea Seifert, Alie Hall.

Charlotte Kuebitz, a third-year statistics major from San Diego, said it was her first DataFest. She knew the weekend event would be busy and tiring and it “fully lived up to that expectation.”

“An unexpected benefit was seeing so many of my stats friends and professors together in a non-classroom setting, but still academic,” Kuebitz said. “I only knew one other person on my team before this weekend, and we had a mix of majors and grade levels. I feel like we utilized each of our strengths and skillsets when working through the data.”

Rajagopalan, a statistics major from Redmond, Washington, said she gained experience in R Programming and learned about a new R Package.

“This was a great opportunity for me to network and connect with other statistics majors and data science students, and ask them about their projects,” Rajagopalan said. “I even networked with a judge from UC Santa Barbara Statistics Department after the competition.”

The Noyce School of Applied Computing sponsored the event space and provided some funding support for logistical needs. Cal Poly’s Instructionally Related Activities (IRA) fund also helped to expand the event.

“We brought in six fantastic judges from external institutions and industry,” Robinson said. “I think that's a great opportunity for students to network and a great place for alumni to come back and, see what we're doing and get involved.”

DataFest started at UCLA in 2011.

Cal Poly statistics Professor Hunter Glanz first established DataFest as an instructionally related activity at the San Luis Obispo campus. But the pandemic forced the first anticipated in-person event online at Cal Poly to be held virtually in 2020.

This year’s challenge topic remains confidential as the American Statistical Association still is presenting the competition to additional students across the country this spring, with around 75 institutions across the country participating.

“It took my team a while to go down different paths to see any notable trends.” Kuebitz said. “We would find a slight trend, but it didn’t seem to lead anywhere meaningful. I didn’t feel confident in our story until early Sunday morning. It was inspiring to see the different angles from the other team’s presentations. I was honestly surprised to get ‘Best in Show’ compared to everyone else’s interesting presentations.”

Teams huddled and strategized all weekend long and enjoyed food provided by the event coordinators.

“On Friday night, the students met and watched an opening video,” Robinson said. “They learned about the data and the context and got access to it. Then they dug into it. The ASA competition coordinators do a good job of trying to find datasets that students relate to, like concert-related topics and things like that.”

Last year, the students assessed textbook learning data and used stats to figure out what were good questions and unclear questions in the material and how they might modify them with text analysis.

“It felt very meta, where you had students analyzing student learning data,” Robinson said.

The organization that provides the dataset for ASA DataFest events is always an industry or company partner and they reach out and they ask for winner slides.

“They're taking that information and depending on where they're located, they'll try to go to a local DataFest,” Robinson said.

Robinson said she hopes to keep growing the competition and include other universities on the Central Coast if possible.

To help fundraise for the event, an ongoing Crowdfund link has been established and will run through May 10 on the following link: https://crowdfund.calpoly.edu/datafest2025.

Students said they enjoyed the collaborative learning and networking aspects of the event, including exploring the vast dataset that they were required to analyze. Photo by Alexis Kovacevic