UNILAG, OAU Students Win IT Competition

Three students, one from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, and two from the University of Lagos, Akoka, have emerged joint winners of the first Inter-Campus Machine Learning competition.

Olajide Folarin, OAU, and UNILAG’s Sadiq Aderinto and Stanley Dukor, emerged winners of the competition which ended on Friday following an intensive five-day boot camp.

The competition was sponsored by Bluechip Technologies and organised by Data Science Nigeria.

The three first-place winners individually earned the highest score for machine learning algorithm development. The boot camp was facilitated by 11 visiting international experts in artificial intelligence, five online tutors and 15 Nigerian-based business leaders.

More than 10,000 students from 95 campuses participated in the four-stage competition. It included a pre-qualification, pre-study, a quiz, a Kaggle competition and a validation call. The top 85 students competed at the five-day all-expenses-paid boot camp at the Peninsula Resort, Lekki-Ajah Expressway, Lagos, from October 10-14.

The Inter-Campus Machine Learning competition was aimed at increasing Nigeria’s experience and expertise in data science and to enhance the opportunities and employability of Nigerian students through an incentivised exposure to advanced world-class knowledge

Each of the three winners received $1,000 and an opportunity for a short-term internship at the Bluechip technology firm. In addition, campus volunteers from the universities with the highest number of participants in the pre-qualification process were also rewarded for promoting and mobilising participants for the competition.

The University of Lagos, Ladoke Akintola University Ogbomoso, and the University of Ibadan campus volunteers received N150,000, N100,000 and N50,000 respectively.

Meanwhile, students and alumni of the OAU and UNILAG are currently engaging one another in trending Twitter bants with hashtag #unilagvsoau.