KUALA LUMPUR, May 2 — A team of six University of Malaya (UM) students made the country proud when they came out on top in an international competition for solutions in cryptocurrency trading.

The six students from UM’s Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology with their three mentors participated in the 48-hour Academia Datathon International University Data Science Society championship, a first-time collaboration between the Centre of Applied Data Science (CADS) and Data Science Society.

One-hundred-and-thirty students from notable universities in Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Croatia and India took part in the competition.

The teams were each given a case of financial time-series predictions with cryptocurrencies from various sources, where they had to build a prediction model of the major cryptocurrencies’ prices and make an autonomous artificial intelligence decision-maker for trading and investing.

Advertisement

The ultimate aim was to build a successful model for cryptocurrency markets.

The UM team consists of undergraduates Sabrina Kamal Izat, Nur Hidayah Mohd Rosli, S. Prasanta, Yee Xun Wei, and postgraduates Nur Baiti Afini Normadhi and Muhammad Nazrin Napiah. Their mentors are faculty senior lecturers Hoo Wai Lam, Nor Liyana Mohd Shuib and Muhammad Reza Zaba.

CADS founder Sharala Axryd said the organisation is proud to have hosted the young talents in the datathon which required high levels of expertise.

Advertisement

“Winning this first global challenge has proven that Malaysia is a competent nation with the right expertise and talent among these budding data professionals, on par with global players in the field,” she said.

Likewise, the head of the Information Systems Department in UM’s Faculty of Computer Science and Information Sri Devi Ravana said the datathon was a good opportunity for the students to sharpen their skills and gain global knowledge and exposure.

“It was an exciting and informative experience for the students and even the mentors. One where they had to think out of the box when put into real-world situations and apply their knowledge in an effective and timely manner to develop solutions to problems that matter to society,” she said.