Krannert to host analytics case competition

Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management will host the second annual Crossroads Classic Analytics Challenge in February. The case competition is open to undergraduate and graduate students at Purdue, Butler University, Indiana University, and the University of Notre Dame.

This year’s event, which will award $10,000 in prize money, is sponsored by IN3, ECS, and MISO. It focuses on phishing.

Phishing is the most popular form of social engineering and can be leveraged to put malware or ransomware into a company’s environments. MISO performs routine phishing tests to make sure their employees are ready and prepared. ECS helps protect companies from cyber threats every day, and IN3 helps bring people together to create a hub of national security innovation to help solve critical defense priorities.

Students will be tasked with showing how data science and predictive analytics can help companies gain confidence their data is secure by automatically flagging emails trying to capture their information. This will require the ability to search, identify, and wrangle publicly available data that could be used to develop general insights for detecting if an email is or is not a threat.

According to Matthew Lanham, a clinical assistant professor in Krannert’s quantitative methods area who co-founded the Crossroads Classic Analytics Challenge, the competition will particularly attract students from the school’s undergraduate and graduate programs in Business Analytics and Information Management.

“This is the second year of the Crossroads Classic Analytics Challenge and we have already realized more than double the student participation compared to last year with more than 60 teams registered,” he says. “I expect this competition to grow and be the State of Indiana’s premier annual analytics competition that showcases the outstanding business analytics and data science degree programs available from all the participating schools.

“Companies like our co-sponsors realize the talent pool we have in this state, so what better way for them to identify and recruit the top talent than to have all students compete to solve a problem that matters to them. I hope companies and potential future sponsors of the competition also realize that we have wonderful analytics faculty at these schools that can work together as a team to create a great opportunity for them and all our students.”

Last year the University of Notre Dame hosted the event with the Teachers Credit Union sponsoring $15,000 in student awards. Next year’s challenge will be hosted at either Butler University or Indiana University.

For more information on this year’s competition and to register, visit https://crossroadsclassicanalyticschallenge.com/.