College of Business
AACSB International EQUIS - European Quality Improvement System

PhD student triumphs in JDD-2018 Global Digitalization Challenge

Kai Yang, PhD student from the Department of Information Systems, together with two undergraduate students from South China University of Technology, triumphed in the JD Discovery-2018 Global Digitalization Challenge (Hong Kong division) and entered a 24-hour offline limit global challenge held in Beijing on 12-13 January. The team eventually got the Second Prize of Global Final, and was awarded RMB200,000.

Organised by JD Digits, a leading digital technology company in China, JD Discovery-2018 Global Digitalization Challenge aimed to connect technical talents with digital elites. It was a real application scenario design global competition, AI and big data experts, industry leaders, and top investors joined the competition as mentors and judges.

Led by Kai, the team outperformed other 75 teams and won the championship of Hong Kong division in December 2018, after rigorous review by the competition's expert committee. On 12-13 January 2019, the team joined a final round and competed with other winning teams from Mainland China division, USA division and Israel division in Beijing. Thanks to their top scored business plan, they eventually got the Second Prize of Global Final.

Kai was excited about the team’s achievement, and he shared that the biggest challenge in the competition was the unsatisfying performance of ARIMA, an autoregression algorithm model for forecasting. It failed to capture the patterns of non-periodic changes during data collection. “To overcome this challenge, we discussed and tried to improve our model by adding other algorithms. We then tested the performance of different algorithms and found that a tree-based learning algorithm, namely LightGBM, performed the best,” Kai elaborated.

To learn more about the competition, please visit website.