- The month-long C# and ML/Python challenge saw over 10,000 participants competing across India
GURUGRAM, India, March 17, 2021 – The 2021 edition of Code Combat, dunnhumby’s annual competitive coding and problem-solving event, held virtually, saw over 10,000 engineers, programmers and coders across India competing to resolve a complex problem in a time-based controlled environment. In partnership with TechGig, India’s largest tech community, this second edition challenge was set to test skillsets across multiple levels.
The C# track in this second edition of Code Combat continued to draw those interested in competitive coding, while the new ML/Python track allowed data science stalwarts to showcase their prowess combined with their business problem-solving skills. The challenges judged multiple skills including domain proficiency, modeling skills, and business understanding along with solution scalability, innovation and effectiveness of the solution through a series of rounds.
Mugdha Banerjee won the grand prize of Rs. 75,000 with a record winning code execution time of 4.21 seconds in the final round of the C# challenge. Following Mugdha, Manoj Kumar Mandal and Iram Ali Ahmad won the first and second prizes with execution time of 6.21 and 6.54 seconds.
“The contest was really interesting,” said Iram Ali. “It tested almost every aspect of a programmer like theoretical knowledge about C# through MCQs, practical knowledge through coding rounds. The questions in both coding rounds were very challenging and interesting as they required deep understanding of algorithms and data structures. Overall, it was a great experience.”
Sunkishala Karthik, winner of the Python and ML challenge said, “The dunnhumby Code Combat 2.0 was fun, interesting and a great opportunity for me to learn and explore. Winning the competition gives me a lot of confidence to learn more and succeed. I really appreciate the organisers for giving me this opportunity to work on such an interesting business problem.” Following Sunikshala, Barkha Agrawal and Lovekesh Bhati came second and third.
Paritosh Kumar, Head of Product Engineering at dunnhumby explains: “It’s great to see the enthusiasm around the virtual avatar of this challenge in its second year of inception. We had some great submissions for both of the C# programming and Machine Learning problems. At dunnhumby we believe diversity of thought is a competitive edge and it’s been fantastic to see the success of our female participants with 5 of the top 10 winners being women, including the winner of the C# challenge Mugdha Banerjee. Congratulations to the winning candidates.”
dunnhumby has recently been in news for its highly talented pool of employees with three of dunnhumby’s people managers in India’s top 100 Great People Managers 2020 by Forbes and Great Manager Institute. The dunnhumby team was also recognised by Analytics India Magazine with Sanjay Shukla from dunnhumby being names as one of the ’40 under 40′ data scientists in India.
Manoj Madhusudanan, Head of dunnhumby India, has explains how strengthening innovation and culture are two pillars of dunnhumby’s growth: “A culture of innovation is pivotal for us to achieve the vision of India being the engine driving dunnhumby’s growth. Events such as these act as enablers and there is no better time than a pandemic-induced pressure to foster innovative ideas and boost up the organisation.”
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About dunnhumby India
Established in 2008, dunnhumby India is a hub of Data Engineering, Data Science, and Product Development with deep expertise in Price & Promotions, Category Management, Customer Knowledge, Customer Engagement, and Media delivery. The teams in India play a key role for clients spread globally at different stages of their journey with dunnhumby.
With a long history of Data Science and software development and the ability to attract exceptional talent through encouraging a culture of innovation, agility and flexibility, the India office sits at the heart of global dunnhumby, influencing the success of our entire client network. It is at the forefront of developing the best products and science using a variety of techniques and tools including highly scalable cloud hosted models, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.
