Can data science reveal the best county in Ireland?

Project Showcase, National College of Ireland’s online display of fourth-year computing student profiles and their degree capstone projects, has reached its high point, with the presentation today of the annual awards for best projects.

The College is grateful to Citi, ESB, eShopWorld, Fidelity Investments and Workday for their sponsorship of prizes.

This year, the College created a new category. Dean of the School of Computing, Dr Pramod Pathak explains:

“Each year, our judges come across projects that narrowly miss winning the top prize in their specialist category, but which are particularly notable and deserving of recognition. To address this, the School of Computing has created an ‘open’ award, where we consider projects from across the school and their broader contribution to computing.

We have named this the Ada Lovelace Award, after the first computer programmer, who was not celebrated in her own right until 2009. It is particularly fitting, perhaps, therefore, that the first recipient of this award is a woman.”

—  NCI Ada Lovelace Award for a final year computing project – Tanya Beth Rosaldo for her Data Analytics project ‘Effects of CO2 emissions and fossil fuel consumption on car companies – especially electric car manufacturers’

—  eShopWorld Award for Best Project by a student on the BSc (Hons) in Computing – Max Delaney for his project ‘GFree’

—  ESB Award for Best Project by a student on the BSc (Hons) in Technology Management – Brian McGrath for his project ‘The International Ecological Footprint and Land Usage’

—  Workday Award for Best Project by a student on the BSc (Hons) in Business Information Systems – Workday Award: Dylan Murphy for his project ‘Food Rescue’

—  Best Project by a student on a Part-time Programme – Fidelity Investments Award: Mark Kelly for his project ‘Identifying the Irish county with the best quality of life’

—  Citi’s Overall Award of €3000 was awarded jointly to Business Information Systems student Nathan Hodgkiss, for his project ‘Smart Programming Journal’, and Computing student, Ben Carroll, for his Data Analytics project ‘Retro – A web application to facilitate Agile sprint retrospectives’

So, has data science finally settled the question of the best county in Ireland?

“Yes and no,” says computing lecturer Frances Sheridan. “Mark Kelly created an app that takes into account a number of variables, so you can filter the qualities that matter most to you: crime rates, classroom sizes, property prices, etc.; and see which county suits you best, based on your priorities – though of course, as a Dub, I can tell you that Dublin is the clear winner!”

If an app, that can quickly and easily account for multiple dynamic factors and supply you with the optimal result, is of interest to you, you can find out how to licence Mark’s work for commercial use through his profile on the Project Showcase site. If you’d just like to see how your county rates, you can check out the quality of life in your county here.

“Project Showcase allows our students to connect with potential investors and employers,” explains Sheridan. “This year, we added a feature to allow graduate recruiters or VCs to make direct contact with our final year students: this has proved very popular with employers and has worked well for our students, so is a facility we will retain for next year.”

The Project Showcase website will continue to feature graduate projects from 2021 until April next year when the build-out for 2022 will commence.