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Big data boosts 48-hour marathon

Eight teams gathered at the Galp refinery in Sines in a quest to find a solution to a real challenge: optimising and rendering Galp's refining system more efficient through the use of a huge data set

Friday, 8 a.m. All is set for the starting pistol for Datathon, a real game-format challenge to be solved in a 48-hour marathon. Great expectations and curiosity aroused by the topic – big data - among the eight participating teams of six members each, who arrived at the Galp refinery in Sines from Lisbon, Porto and Aveiro, and also from Spain and Liverpool, in the United Kingdom. No one knows what the challenge is, but the competition is expected to be hard-fought, with a cash prize of 50,000 euros at stake.

The countdown begins, with nerves affecting some of the participants, who only managed a few hours of sleep in the almost three days of the event, the motivation of the challenge having overcome their fatigue. “We knew it was going to be difficult, but we weren´t expecting to have to deal with this enormous set of data,” reveals Pedro Carvalho, a researcher at the University of Aveiro, far from knowing that he would be one of the winners.

When the time in which to find the solution had run out, the eight teams took to the makeshift stage assembled at the refinery to present their projects, in a final attempt to attract the attention of the jurors, composed of three Galp employees and two guests. “All the projects were of an exceptional quality, although none of them met the defined criteria in full”, José Manuel Mendonça, the chairman of the board of INESC-TEC's chairman of the jury, told Energiser before the results were announced. “The ‘magic’ formula wasn´t found, but the paths towards it most certainly were," added Carlos Silva, Galp's COO.

Quicker than anyone expected, the jurors came to a unanimous decision, ending the long wait for the 48 participants. Amid hope and the conviction of having done a good job, the teams listened to Galp´s COO, and the host, Martinho Correia, director of the refinery, praising and thanking them for their performance, dedication and commitment to the challenge. “This initiative helps us find new ways of developing our knowledge,” he said.

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Unveiling the mystery, the challenge ended not with one winner but two, whose solutions will now be worked on together with experts from Galp. With regard to universities, Aveiro and Liverpool will now take their 25,000 euro prize awarded by Carlos Silva to their respective campuses and hope to be able to invest it in new research equipment to help them advance their work.