Data science & AI students use power BI to crack attendance code

A group of students from M.Sc. Data Science & M.Sc. Artificial Intelligence recently completed a short internship to develop a dashboard prototype to support attendance management and tracking in the University.

The University uses an attendance management system which permits efficient recording of attendance and absence and staff began to wonder what other efficiencies and business insights might be available with this data. Step forward Youssef El Ghoulali M.Sc. Data Science, Mary Miti M.Sc. AI, Abhishek Angadi M.Sc. AI & Karan Shrestha M.Sc. Data Science.

Within a matter of weeks, this team had produced a working prototype using simulated data which could be deployed securely to any staff member who wished to use the dashboard to support students to improve their attendance. The dashboard included functionality to visualise student attendance by postcode, nationality, working status as well as permitting a deep dive by faculty, school and course.

Dr Liam Naughton, Senior Lecturer in Mathematics, was glowing in his praise of the work completed by the students: “What we have here is an example of excellence shown by four tremendous students who were delighted to work on this internship alongside their studies. The solution they have produced in a short period of time can save staff countless hours by introducing efficiencies in how we support students. Our students are ‘chomping at the bit’ to get their hands on real projects to demonstrate what they can do. They achieved all of this without ever getting their hands on the real data. All we had to do was provide the parameters and the characteristics of the data and these students did the rest.” He further emphasised the value that students can bring to the university as well as to industry partners by adding, “if you are someone who is struggling with your data and can’t see the proverbial wood for the trees, get in touch. We have many students who would be delighted to help you to generate insights from your data on a paid or unpaid internship. Just email l.naughton@wlv.ac.uk for a chat.”

Stay tuned to hear more about the success of these four students in the near future…