Two interdisciplinary teams of engineering students took home prizes from national "hackathon" competitions during the fall of 2020.

The competitions challenge teams of students and researchers from across the nation to leverage their skills working with big data to solve mechanical engineering problems.

The events, which took place in August and November, were hosted by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Mechanical engineering student Laxmi Poudel's team took home second place from the International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference in August. Poudel's teammates included Madan Dahal and Bi Senior Foua, both from Arkansas Tech University.

In November, a team of three University of Arkansas engineering students took home third place at the International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition. The team was comprised of Yinshuang Xiao and Qingyu Xiao from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Xiaotong Sun from the Department of Industrial Engineering.

The competition challenged students to use new machine learning and statistical techniques to tackle large, unstructured data sets, including images, audio, video, and undefined text and numbers.

"These competitions are nation-wide, and even included international participants, so they are very competitive," said Zhenghui Sha, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and advisor to the students. "These students did a great job and represented the University of Arkansas well. "I was especially pleased to see such a diverse, interdisciplinary group of students at the forefront of this effort."

Tim Graves, managing director for technical and engineering communities at ASME, said the hackathons brought together passionate students in a collaborative virtual format.

"In 2020, as the world pivoted to virtual collaboration, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' Computers and Information in Engineering Division launched virtual hackathons at two of our research and development conferences, bringing a new way for students to participate with ASME, from wherever they are," he said. "We witnessed these hackathons allow groups of passionate students to learn rapidly while doing, develop and grow new skills, and work as teams to solve a problem. The hackathon experience encourages empowerment, self-directed learning and the opportunity for volunteers to mentor the next generation. We will continue these events at our virtual conferences in 2021. We were delighted to have the participation of the students from the University of Arkansas, and we invite students from around the world to check these programs out."