RISC Scholar leads students to excel in a STEM Fellowship data science competition

An interdisciplinary team of York students led by RISC Scholar, Dr. Jude Kong, placed in the top three in the STEM Fellowship Inter-University Big Data Challenge.

Jude Kong

Mahakprit Kaur (biomedical science, Faculty of Science), Taylor Cargill (biology, Faculty of Science), Kevin Hui (computer science, Lassonde School of Engineering), and Minh Vu (computer science, Lassonde School of Engineering), led by RISC Scholar and Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics Dr. Jude Kong, finished third for the Science Communication Award, winning a prize of $400. Overall, there were 213 teams representing 69 universities from all over the world. Dr. Kong's team was the only team representing York University that made it to the finals.

The award-winning paper entitled “Can Tweets be used to identify medical resource shortages and inform healthcare supply-chain decisions?” sought to determine which patterns existed between Twitter mentions of shortage keywords and actual shortages of personnel protective equipment during COVID. The outcomes show promise that leveraging social media, particularly Twitter, has the potential to provide a cost-effective and relatively rapid method that can inform resource allocation to nursing homes that need it most.