As finalists they were rewarded with a 10-week internship at Rolls-Royce which will comprise shadowing the R2 Data Labs team, working on some of the largest and most complex data sets available, and investigating ways to combine operational knowledge and expertise with data to create actionable insights.
Rawaida and Weijiang wrote a blog post of their experience.
In the Data Storytelling Challenge hosted by Rolls-Royce plc, students were asked to develop visualisation that provided insights into complex data. We were given large datasets that simulate the operation and maintenance of 90 aircrafts over a time span of 15 years, totalling up to 28 files of 863MB in size. Due to the dataset complexity and the time constraints, we decided to focus on telling the story of one critical component of these aircrafts – engines. We saw how the engines were operated, maintained and discarded throughout their lifecycles, which we believed could help various stakeholders to enhance their real-time decision making.
Out of over 500 entries, our visualisation idea led us to the final competition in CFMS (The Centre for Modelling & Simulation), Bristol on 28th March 2018. On that date, all of the 3 finalists were asked to give a 20-min presentation followed by a 10-min Q&A session. Although we did not come first, our high standard entry was rewarded with the opportunity of a 10-week internship at Rolls-Royce. We were very grateful that the Department of Computer Science in the University of Sheffield provided financial assistance for our trip to Bristol. As students from MSc Data Analytics, we believe this internship is a good opportunity to experience how data analytics can be applied to solve problems in industry.