History

This page traces DS@GT ARC from its founding through its growth in membership, publications, and competition results.

For current cycle status and upcoming recruitment, visit the Join page. For outcomes, see Impact and Publications.

ARC began in Spring 2022 by entering the BirdCLEF 2022 competition and winning the Best Working Notes Award ($2,500 GCP credits). In Fall 2022, the team formalized a preparatory “EDA” group around BirdCLEF data. Spring 2023’s BirdCLEF entry repeated the win, taking another Best Working Notes Award ($2,500 cash).

Fall 2023 introduced the “Kaggle-CLEF Interest Group”, a semester-long program covering competitions (Kaggle, CLEF), core skills (EDA, paper reading), and an internal Kaggle competition that prepared members for Spring teams. Spring 2024 expanded substantially to 31 members across 7 CLEF labs and 14 tasks, drawn from OMSCS/OMSA, undergrad, and on-campus/online cohorts. The group published 11 working notes in the CLEF 2024 proceedings (22 unique authors) and won a third consecutive Best Working Notes Award for BirdCLEF 2024 ($2,500). Members also presented at the OMSCS Conference and GT showcases (PlantCLEF won the Student Choice Award), and several earned course credit through CS 8903 and similar.

Fall 2024 refined the Interest Group format, added PACE cluster training, and secured access to Georgia Tech’s PACE HPC cluster via PACESHIP, complementing continued GCP use. That foundation enabled a much larger Spring 2025: 78 participants, 44 published authors, 22 working notes, and 14 CLEF labs. The group also received EVPR-PACESHIP support, continued to convert competition work into course credit, conference presentations, and external recognition, and sent 10 Georgia Tech representatives to CLEF 2025 in Madrid, Spain to present in person.

Fall 2025 ran the same onboarding-and-preparation cycle for the year ahead. The Spring 2026 CLEF cycle is now underway, with new members entering through Fall 2026 recruitment.