This year marked the 9th annual HPCC Systems Poster Competition, and it had the largest voting participation yet with over 200 votes cast for the Community Choice Award! The winners were announced at the Closing Plenary and Awards Ceremony during the 2024 Community Virtual Summit. Their projects highlighted the innovative work of our academic community in leveraging the HPCC Systems platform to solve their big data problems. The participants competed in 4 categories:

• Data Analytics
• Platform Enhancement
• Use Case
• Research

Distinguished members of the HPCC Systems community judged the participants’ work in their perspective category, and all 30 participants were eligible for the Community Choice Award. Poster voting was open for a few weeks before the summit, allowing virtual attendees to vote for their favorite poster. Students have worked on their projects for months and were required to submit an abstract, followed by their completed poster, and a five-minute video. Each student was given a dedicated page on our Community Wiki to showcase their resources. The posters are now publicly available on the 2024 Poster Contest Wiki pages.

2024 HPCC Systems Poster Contest Winners

HPCC Systems is a huge supporter of WiT(women in tech) initiatives. We would like to bring special attention that for the first time in the history of this competition we had an all female cohort of winners! All of the recognition belongs to these winners and their amazing work!

HPCC Systems, as a part of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, has a focus on organic outreach to local and global female-driven organizations, the impact of these efforts can really be felt in the HPCC Systems program.

Our summer internship boasted a 55% involvement rate of female participants, all of the participants’ work can be viewed here. We could not be more proud that the 2024 poster competition resulted in the first all female cohort of winners.

We are so happy to see these powerful women lead the competition this year.

Meet the Judges

The judges met each student in their category in virtual Q and A sessions where they asked questions and sought clarity on any points arising from each student’s resources. Once these sessions were done, the judges submitted their final scorecards to be tallied and announced at the summit.

The four judges that you’ll meet below each brought a unique perspective to the poster contest based on their varied knowledge and experience gained in their professional lives. Three of the judges were former interns who are now full time LexisNexis Risk Solutions employees, and our fourth judge has been a HPCC Systems pillar for many years.

Lili Xu

Senior Software Engineer II • LexisNexis Risk Solutions

Chris Connelly

Software Engineer III • LexisNexis Risk Solutions

Fulvio Favilla Filho

Software Engineer I • LexisNexis Risk Solutions

Shamser Ahmed

Sr Consulting SWE • LexisNexis Risk Solutions

2024 Poster Submissions

The projects covered a wide variety of topics. Some projects focused on topics for bettering everyday like, Enhancing Early Detection and Visualization of Autism Spectrum Disorder, Asteroid Detection and Tracking, and a Machine Learning Approach to Diabetes Detection and Ground Water Contamination – An analysis of contamination across various state in India.

Others were more platform tools centered with projects like: Model Inversion Attack with HPCC Systems Platform, Regression Testing of ECL Bundles and Hyperlinks Testing on GitHub Actions, Command Line Tool For Describing and Testing ESP APIs.

The students in our community leverage the HPCC Systems technology for good to better the world we live in.

Click on the links below to read the abstracts and view the posters in each of the following four categories:

Data Analytics:

Data Analytics encompasses projects focused on leveraging HPCC Systems to extract insights from different types of data resources and that includes projects that show interesting visualizations obtained from the data or insights that were not explicitly visible before the data was analyzed.

Platform Enhancement:

Platform Enhancement refers to projects where students were contributing directly with the open source project by either enhancing the quality of the code or proposing a new feature or new functionality for the platform.

Use Case:

Use Case refers to projects where students were leveraging HPCC Systems in a specific industry or area of knowledge and how HPCC Systems contributed to that specific area of industry or area of knowledge. We have had cases where students were leveraging HPCC systems, to study astronomy, psychological diseases and so forth, or even the quality of the air and water.

Research:

Research is the track where we group projects that are associated with research efforts. It could be research with our academic partners gifted projects or more long term efforts that will eventually result in a scientific paper being published.

Wrap up…

The 9th annual HPCC Systems Poster Competition showcased the incredible talent and innovation within the academic community. The participation and voting for the Community Choice Award reached record numbers, highlighting the growing interest and engagement in leveraging the HPCC Systems platform for big data solutions. The competition’s emphasis on diversity and inclusion was evident in the historic achievement of an all-female cohort of winners, reflecting the ongoing commitment to supporting women in tech initiatives. The judges’ diverse perspectives and the rigorous evaluation process ensured a fair and comprehensive assessment of the participants’ work. Overall, the 2024 poster competition was a resounding success, and the groundbreaking achievements of the winners and participants underscore the bright future of data analytics and research within the HPCC Systems community.