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ENFUSE qualifying contest at NCI


UPDATE: The NCI MSc in Data Science teams going forward to the ENFUSE finals are Team At It Again! (putting machine learning at the heart of customer segmentation - Celine Moran, Shveta Srivastava, Debratna Dhali, Sai Srimaha and Vishnu Valluri) and Team MEG Support Tools (predicting the severity of medical errors and assisting in risk assessment, reporting and action planning - Ankit Rungta, Karthi Mahendran, Kirubakaran Balaraman, Pooja Rakate, Priyanka Chimthankar and Abhishek Ramprasad) - well done to the teams, best of luck to them and their enterprises on May 27th!

National College of Ireland’s MSc in Data Science students, like their colleagues in TUD and DCU, are currently focused on earning a place at the final of ENFUSE – an initiative of Dublin City Council and Local Enterprise Office.

Working on real business cases for real companies, the students have already created tangible plans for participant enterprises, formed through regular meetings between students and clients, and with academic input from the lecturers supervising the postgraduate programmes taking part. 

The top student teams from each participating MSc class will now move forward to the next stage: a competition in which they can win great prizes both for themselves and for the enterprise they represent.

National College of Ireland (NCI) has gone one step further, in assembling a panel of industry experts to select the NCI finalist teams that will move on to the next stage.

“I think it is important that students get the chance for feedback from people working in the industry, as it brings a value to the work they have invested in ENFUSE, even if they do not make it to competition level,” says Dr Anu Sahni, Programme Director for the MSc & Postgraduate Diploma in Data Analytics. 

“I am particularly grateful to Alan Doherty, Head of Innovation Design at Citi Innovation Lab Dublin; Andrew Macadam, Global Field Lead at Microsoft for Startups; Anthony McCauley, Strategic Advisor at Skillnet; Colum Horgan, Technology Co-Founder and CEO of Aspira and Board Member of Enterprise Ireland; and Deirdre O'Neill, Senior Regional Development Executive for Dublin at Enterprise Ireland."

"Our students will gain greatly from facing these experts,” says Michael Bradford, Programme Director for the MSc in Data Analytics, "not just in any connections they might make, but in the professional behaviour required by presenting to a panel of this calibre."

“It has been fantastic to collaborate with National College of Ireland and the MSc in Data Analytics students as part of ENFUSE this year. NCI students have applied their learning and provided local enterprises with new ideas, tangible recommendations and a bespoke plan,” says Norman Thompson, part of the Economic Development Team at Dublin City Council and the Local Enterprise Office.

ENFUSE allows local enterprises and social enterprises in the Dublin City area to gain access to the specialist knowledge of postgraduate students at DCU, TUD and NCI. The ENFUSE Finals is a special event where the top student teams from the annual programme compete. This year, 39 enterprises were matched with a student team from either TUD, DCU or NCI. From the 39 student teams, 7 will be shortlisted as ENFUSE Finalist student teams. The finalist teams will represent their university/college, lecturer and enterprise, and will compete by pitching to industry/expert judges on the plan they produced for their allocated enterprise. 

Winners of the ENFUSE NCI Finals will be announced on Thursday 20th May at 3.30pm (this news item will have results addended at that time). The overall ENFUSE Finals 2021 will be hosted on the 27th May.