- At least three and no more than four students members per team; teams can consist of any combination of undergraduates and master level graduate students.
- You can come and go as you please, but all work must be completed on the CSU DataFest premises.
- Before downloading the dataset you must sign the Non-Disclosure Agreement by agreeing to the terms of use and entering your name and email address. At the end of DataFest, delete all data from thumb drives, hard drives, etc. The data are sensitive.
- Should members of your team drop out at the last minute, you might be merged with another team who is also missing members. Additionally, members might be added to your team to make sure everyone has a team to work.
- At all times between 9am-9pm there will be at least one friendly Consultant present. These are faculty, grad students, or other professionals. They all have different areas of expertise, so if you get stuck on something, ask someone else later.
- Feel free to ask anything. This is not an exam, but a collaboratory competition.
- Do not expect the Consultants to write code for you, or do data management, etc. They are there to help point you in the right direction, but you're responsible for getting there on your own.
- Each year, the data set and the challenge are presented to the students early Friday evening, and students spend the first hours generating a research question and developing a plan of attack for the weekend.
- Then comes roughly 18 hours of exploring, computing, puzzle solving, learning, and much trial and error as students move down paths, putting to use what they already know and learning on the fly tools they need but don’t yet know.
- Students from statistics, math, engineering, computer science, social sciences, business analytics, and other disciplines can bring different strengths and toolkits.
