U-M Students Won the 2020 ProjectX Machine Learning Competition

ProjectX was a three-month-long Machine Learning competition hosted by the University of Toronto. MIDAS selected a team of 6 undergraduate students (Sanjeev Raja, Zhizhuo Zhou, Anh Tuan Tran, Amanda Yao, Ziwei Tian and Eric Chen, a student leadership board member) from across the university to participate and arranged for mentorship of their work by Sindhu Kutty. The team competed against 22 other university teams from across the U.S., Canada, and Europe, producing original research focused on climate-related issues throughout the fall semester. The U-M Team won the Weather and Natural Disaster Prediction category, earning a $20,000 prize and an invitation to present at the University of Toronto’s AI Conference in January 2021. The Title of the paper is “The Devil is in the Details: Spatial and Temporal Super-Resolution of Global Climate Models using Deep Learning“.

Listen to Accuweather’s Everything Under the Sun: Weather and Natural Disaster Prediction podcast starring the winning team!

Speaking about their experience, team members shared how the competition has enhanced their U-M education. Zhizhuo Zhou said, “Working with my teammates on this climate change focused machine learning competition has been extremely rewarding. Not only did I learn to become a better computer scientist, I also learned to collaborate with domain experts to create systems with real social impact.” Amanda Yao added, “Digging deeply into a new machine learning application field with 5 passionate teammates in 3 months is an exciting adventure. ProjectX really helped me grow as a machine learning researcher, a critical thinker and a team player.”

Project X U-M Team Members:

  • Eric Chen – College of Engineering, Data Science
  • Sanjeev Raja – College of Engineering, Chemical Engineering
  • Alice Tian – College of Literature, Science and Arts, Informatics
  • Alan Tran – College of Engineering, Computer Science and Data Science
  • Amanda Yao – College of Literature, Science and Arts; Data Science, Mathematics, Economics
  • Zhizhuo Zhou – College of Engineering, Computer Science

Project X Mentor:

  • Sindhu Kutty – Lecturer, College of Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering