Fall Semester Interest Group
- Sign up here: Interest Group Sign up Form
- First Meeting Date: Monday, August 25th, at 8PM EST
- First Meeting: Virtual Zoom, with in-person option at Georgia Tech campus
Are you interested in doing research but need help knowing where to start? Are you interested in sinking your teeth into applicable, real-world datasets to solve challenging problems? Join the Data Science at Georgia Tech (DS@GT) club as we tackle information retrieval and machine learning competitions at CLEF 2026 in the Spring for our fifth year! The DS@GT competition team has won $10,000 worth of prizes across four working note competitions, and have over 30 accepted working note papers into workshop proceedings. For CLEF 2025 alone, we had 43 published authors! By joining us, you’ll gain valuable experience, build a network of like-minded individuals, and have the opportunity to participate in competitive research. You can read more about our achievements on our Impact page.
The interest group takes place in the fall semester and our goal is to learn about data science and research competitions and strategies for success. It will culminate in forming competition teams for CLEF 2026 located in Jena, Germany, a conference that systematically evaluates information access systems primarily through experimentation on shared tasks. All DS@GT members are welcome, regardless of your level of experience.
Suggested Prerequisites
- You should have prior programming experience.
- You should be comfortable writing code in Python using the SciPy stack (numpy, pandas, matplotlib).
- No prior competition experience is necessary.
Interest Group Format
The group will have one section that meet weekly in the evening during US Pacific Time (PST). Exact time is TBD. Meetings are 1 hour in length and will vary in content. All meetings will be held and recorded on Zoom. The rough general schedule for the group is as follows:
August - Recruitment and Kickoff
September - Intro to Applied Research
October - Applied Research Continued
November - Cloud Computing Basics on PACE and Team Formation
A more detailed scheduled can be found on the Notes page.
Members can read, present, and discuss research, and write an exploratory data analysis (EDA). Expected time commitment for the Fall is 2-3 hours a week, with 1 hour for meetings and 1-2 hours preparing for the next week. Participation in the interest group will weigh heavily into Spring competition team placement. Participation in the interest group and returning members who published with us before will be prioritized for team placement. This has worked well for us in the past and we have not encountered an issue where there are more interested people than the amount of teams available. If more help is needed, we will also have a separate interview process at the end of the semester for broader recruitment.
We hope you find this exciting and attend our first meeting and kickoff when the Fall semester starts! At the first meeting, we’ll introduce the club, discuss our goals and activities, and answer any questions you may have. Please RSVP and we’ll remind you when dates are solidified at the end of the first week.
Feel free to share this page and join us in #applied-research-competitions by joining us on the DS@GT Slack: https://linktr.ee/datasciencegt
Videos
Here is a video where we shared our trip to CLEF 2024 in Grenoble, France during one of the meetings in the Fall. Four members were able to attend in-person and present their approches and results.
Here is another video where some of our participants shared their motivations for joining us!
Points of Contact:
Murilo Gustineli murilogustineli@gatech.edu
Ritesh Mehta rmehta307@gatech.edu
Questions?
Please checkout the FAQ page and feel free to contact us if you have more questions!