Poster Presentation - A Winning Capstone Experience

Senior business analytics students enrolled in the Capstone Course, BUAL 5860, compete to win cash prizes and certificates in the Business Analytics Student Poster Competition hosted by the Department of Business Analytics and Information Systems at Harbert College of Business each Spring and Fall Semester.  

Judging Criteria

Presentations are judged on presentation skills, poster display, relevance of problem, clarity of results and implications of findings.

Winners

First Place: $1,500 and certificate of participation
Second Place: $1,000 and certificate of participation
Third Place: $700 and certificate of participation
People's Choice Award: $500 and certificate of participation

When, Where, and What to Expect

Fall 2023 Projects 

The class will be working on different data-driven projects. The students will need to define their own objectives, obtain or collect the data, find patterns in the data through descriptive analytics techniques and create predictive models using machine learning approaches.

Past Presentations and Winners

• Spring 2023

  Spring 2023

   

  TEAM - Hunting Houses "Will the Bubble pop?"

  First Place

  
  Team Members: Kayla Gallman, Rebekah Rath, Sage Ellis, Hunter Lange, and Evan Atkinson.

  

  TEAM - The Beatboxers  "Predicting COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough" 
  

  Second Place

  Team Members: Katie Craze, Megan Gibson, Blake Spradlin, Adam Camlic, Samuel Burnette)

  Pictured with data sponsor representative Ramandeep Kaur from Alabama Department of Public Health

  

  TEAM - The Roots  "Get to The Green: Analyzing Bonnie Plants Store Success"  

  Third Place

  Team Members: Heath Varmette, Dax Wilson, Davis Hawk, Landry Stephens, Rob Griffin, Tucker Brant

  Pictured with data sponsor representatives from Bonnie Plants, Alayna Priebe and Elizabeth Henslee

  

  TEAM - Four Seam "Cold Pitches: The Effect of Weather on Baseball Metrics and Pitch Success"

  People's Choice Award

  Team Members: Alexa Hann, Rapley Hills, Hannah Hoven, Josh Petramale, Boston Smith, Aidan Stoffle

  Pictured with Faculty Dr. Pei Xu and Dr. Pankush Kalgotra

  Spring 2023 Projects

  There are twelve teams in this class working on different data-driven projects. The students had to define their own objectives, obtain or collect the data, find patterns in the data through descriptive analytics techniques and create predictive models using machine learning approaches.

  1.  Bonnie Plants Sales Prediction – Bonnies Plants has shared their sales data from The Home Depot and Lowes. In addition, the total foot traffic and demographic information about the location where stores are located is available. The objective is to identify the factors affecting sales using descriptive and predictive analytics models.

  2. Insomnia condition among college students – The objective is to understand the relationship between mental disorders and insomnia among college students. The students collected data from an online health forum.

  3. Olympians performance prediction – The purpose is to understand the relationship between the performance of the players based on their country of origin. 

  4. The Effect of Weather on Baseball Metrics and Pitch Success – Supported by AU Baseball, the students aim to identify the important sports-related and external factors that can predict pitch success.

  5. Evaluating the performance of EBSCO customers – Sponsored by EBSCO, students are analyzing customer transaction data to find the differences between low and high-performing customers.

  6. Predicting COVID-19 breakthrough infections in Alabama – Sponsored by the Alabama Department of Public Health, students are building models to compute the likelihood of a patient getting a breakthrough infection.

  7. Will the bubble pop? - The housing market is in constant flux with houses being listed and sold every single day. This project examines the current housing market to determine if the conditions are similar with the housing market before the 2008 crash. Comparing these data points will allow us to forecast the potential of another crash in the current housing market.

• Fall 2022

  Fall 2022

  View Fall 2022 Presentations

  

  TEAM - Model Behavior
  First Place
  Team Members: Nicholas Knautz, Chris Cox, Matthew Mayers, Grace Turney, and Alex Hamm.

  Team members are pictured with course instructor Pankush Kalgotra (left) and department chair Uzma Raja (right).

  
  

  TEAM - The Dream Team
  Second Place
  Team Members:  Liqi Lu, Will Bowman, Sam Richardson,  Zhongxing Chen and Christian Wilson

  Team members are pictured with course instructor Pankush Kalgotra (left) and department chair Uzma Raja (right).

  

  TEAM- The One and Only
  Third Place
  Team Members: Sam Easterling, Joshua Picott, Christian Conboy, Emma Meeks, Savannah Street.

  Team members are pictured with course instructor Pankush Kalgotra (left) and department chair Uzma Raja (right).

  Fall 2022 Projects

  There are seven teams in this class working on different data-driven projects. The students had to define their own objectives, obtain or collect the data, find patterns in the data through descriptive analytics techniques and create predictive models using machine learning approaches. A brief description of each dataset is given below.

  1. Bonnie Plants Sales Prediction – Bonnies Plants has shared their two years of sales data from Home Depot and Lowes with the BASY department. In addition, the total foot traffic and demographics information about the location where stores are located is available. The objective is to identify the factors affecting the sales using descriptive and predictive analytics models.
  2. Healthcare analytics – Focusing on the condition of epilepsy, students have obtained the medical conditions of epilepsy patients from an online health website. The objective is to find the health disparities among epilepsy patients by gender and age.
  3. Sleep Study - We got access to the sleep-related data. The dataset contains sequential information about sleep stages recorded overnight from more than 2,600 patients with heart related disorders. The objective is to create classification models to diagnose the heart diseases using the sleep patterns. (Acknowledgements - Dr. Rupesh Agrawal, Northern Kentucky University)
  4. Sports Analytics – We had access to NCAA basketball games data. In this unique dataset, the detail of each game is available including the different plays every second in the game. The objective is to understand the trends in the events over years across all teams. (Acknowledgements - Dr. David Paradice)
  5. Game days and Crime rate – The objective is to find a relationship between the crime rate and the game days. The students have collected data about the crimes and game schedules from multiple sources.
  6. American Hospital Association – The objective is to find the relationship between the use of technology by hospitals across all the regions in the US and the satisfaction of their employees. The BASY department has access to the unique AHA datasets for 13 years.
• Spring 2022

  Spring 2022

  View Spring 2022 Presentations

  

  TEAM 8 - Auburn Analysts
  First Place
  Team members: Chloe Mikus, Isabel De Armas, Pierce Dickson, Brady Watts, and Anne Hays Wright

  

  TEAM 10 -Dill or No Dill
  Second Place
  Team members: Jack Ray, Danny Trainer, Kayla Taylor, Anthony Bostany, and Noah Vaughn

  

  TEAM 13 - The Miner League
  Third Place
  Team Members: Frank Hudgins, Riley Spengeman, Mary Koch, Kyle Travelstead, Grace Crosson

  

  TEAM 7 - BUAL Ballers
  Peoples' Choice Award
  Team members: Jiawei Tong, Tiancheng Jiang, Tanner Rowburrey, Madison Morrow, W. Buddy Haas, Annabel Antoniak