On the 27th May, student teams and representatives from participating enterprises, universities and industry stakeholders came together online for the ENFUSE Finals 2021. At the finals, 7 teams from TU Dublin, Dublin City University and National College of Ireland (NCI) competed by pitching to industry judges on the plan they created for a local enterprise. As part of their masters’ programme, each team supported a local enterprise in Dublin by sharing ideas, knowledge and by creating a bespoke plan to help the enterprise innovate. The top 3 teams won specialist mentoring and training supports from the Local Enterprise Office Dublin City for their allocated enterprises along with prizes from Dublin Place Brand.
For NCI, this was a first outing in this competition, and it is both a pride and delight to place second on this first attempt.
MSc in Data Analytics students: Celine Moran, Shveta Srivastava, Debratna Dhali and Vishnu Valluri worked together as Team At It Again.
Speaking on behalf of the team, Celine Moran said: "It was inspiring to work with Maite and Niall from At It Again, who are so passionate about design and literature that we became engrossed in their business, and dedicated to helping them strategically grow for the future.”
Dr Anu Sahni, Programme Director for the MSc & Postgraduate Diploma in Data Analytics commented: “I am delighted for Team At It Again, who successfully placed machine learning at the heart of consumer segmentation”
Also competing on behalf of NCI in the ENFUSE final was Team MEG Support Tools: Ankit Rungta, Karthi Mahendran, Kirubakaran Balaraman, Pooja Rakate, Priyanka Chimthankar and Abhishek Ramprasad.
“We were excited to work with MEG, to have the chance of providing healthcare-related solutions based on all we learned throughout our Master’s degree,” said Abishek Ramprasad, representing the team. “We devised a method for predicting the severity of the medical errors and the level of MERP category that would help the frontline workers to engage in investigations, risk assessments, incident reports, develop action plans, and get medical advice. Working with MEG helped us bridge the gap between academic understanding and practical application, giving us additional insight into real-world problem-solving.”
Michael Bradford, Programme Director for the MSc in Data Analytics noted: “The teams had to balance the needs of their client business with the demands of the Data Mining and Machine Learning module they were undertaking. ENFUSE provides an opportunity for students who have learned ‘how’ to do something to understand ‘why’ these skills are so valuable in their application to real business situations.”
Speaking at the ENFUSE Finals, Greg Swift, Head of Enterprise and Economic Development. said: "ENFUSE connects enterprises with students, which greatly benefits both parties. Local enterprises benefit from bespoke research and a plan, while students benefit from industry experience and an opportunity to directly apply their learning to support a local enterprise."
ENFUSE 2021 – Top 3 teams:
- Students: Carl Byrne, Daryl Connolly, Claire Doherty, Dylan Finlay, Daniela Tapia. Client Enterprise: My Tea Workshop. University/College: TU Dublin. MSc Programme: MSc Strategic Management (FT). Module: Strategic Marketing. Lecturer: Dr Lucia Walsh.
- Students: Celine Moran, Shveta Srivastava, Debratna Dhali, Sai Srimaha, Vishnu Valluri. Client Enterprise: At It Again. University/College: NCI. MSc Programme: MSc in Data Analytics. Module: Data Mining & Machine Learning II (Module 2) Lecturers: Dr. Anu Sahni & Michael Bradford.
- Students: Caoimhe O’Sullivan, Max Ricardo Filho, Mitzi Jacinta Sandoval, Mariyyah Alatni. Client Enterprise: Twigs. University/College: TU Dublin. MSc Programme: MSC Business and Entrepreneurship. Module: Consultancy Project. Lecturer: Jennifer Mcdonnell
All teams faced a panel of experts comprised of Ciara O hAodha, Senior Economic Development Officer - Dublin City Council / LEO Dublin City; Edel Flynn, Founder Element78Space; Director; Advisor etc. LEO EVAC Member; Bertie Kelly, Commercial Manager, NCI; Dr Roisin Lyons, Assistant Professor in Entrepreneurship & Innovation – DCU; Dr Anthony Buckley, Head of Department (Enterprise & Business Development), School of Marketing, TUD; marshalled by Mary MacSweeney, Deputy Head of Enterprise & Economic Development, DCC.
Culmination of a wider competition
The ENFUSE Finals, was the culmination of this year’s ENFUSE programme which involved 178 masters’ students that supported 39 local enterprises, across Dublin. ENFUSE led by Dublin City Council and the Local Enterprise Office in collaboration with TU Dublin, Dublin City University and National College of Ireland, matched local enterprises and social enterprises with masters students who as part of a module, worked in teams to directly apply their learning in a real life scenario.
“I am very proud of the level at which all NCI teams participated in this competition from the outset,” says Dr Sahni, “and hope the businesses they worked with received the same value as our MSc students did from undertaking business consultancy driven by data science.
“We held our own internal ENFUSE competition to choose which two teams would go forward to the final, and I would like to thank 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 for acting as judges at that event. It means that every NCI student who took part in ENFUSE had to face a panel of industry experts, which is a prize in itself.”
NCI participating teams and their business clients were:
Team DMC Tours: Komal Bhalerao, Rohan Koli, Sweta Kumari, Mayuresh Londhe, Ananya Chandel, Shubham Raje - NLP and Deep Learning techniques for retrieval of text around locations from historical literature, to quickly identify potential sites of interest to tourists.
Team Open Doors Initiative: Belal Masarrat Farooqui, Jignesh Anil Waghela, Mahesh Arjun Matele, Ruchita Dattatray Patil - Data machine methodology applied toward valuable raw data provided by the Open Doors Initiative, which offers opportunities to some of the marginalised members of our society.
Team City Therapy: Ameya Dalal, Tushar Patil, Anjuli Patel, Rakshata Manjunath - Comparison of Deep Learning Algorithms for Sentiment Analysis of City Therapy and Twitter data using text classification. “Thank you for giving us this opportunity. We learned a lot regarding the Irish market and Irish culture.”
Team HaloSOS: Ritika Chendvenkar, Prathamesh Gaikar, Karen Abasolo, Dhaval Shah, Parag Joshi - Small Footprint Keyword Recognition using Convolutional Neural Networks.
Team Bill Moss Partnership: Shubham Katmusare, Siddhant Goswami, Palash Shinde - Multiclass classification of clustered data based on customer description.
Team Fintechjobs.io: Dawn Walsh, Komal Riddhish Bharadva, Marcelo Fischer, Parth Adesh Darekar, Prasad Rudrappa Shivu, Sachin Harishchandra Nikam - The main goal of this research report is to aid a Fintech Jobs portal to attract as many companies as possible to their website with the help of meta-tags generated using LSTM models.
Team GN Design: Rajesh Ramachandran Nair, Rishab Rao Gauravaram, Rutvik Paresh Mendjoge, Shambhu Chandrakant Patole - Deep Learning methodologies for image captioning and annotation.
Team Hotel Minder: Himanshu Rathee - Predicting rankings of web pages for HotelMinder through the execution of basic search engine optimization.
Team Sapien Innovation: Hari Krishnan Kannan, Girish kandan Murugan, Sushaant Kanakaraj, Vivek Ravindran Nair, Harshita Singh, Suraj Karyamapud – Sentiment Analysis for classification of feedback using Neural Networks.