Postgraduate students from the Research Centre for Carbon Solutions (RCCS), Fergus Mcilwaine and John Young, were awarded the DeepNote prize for their application of machine learning techniques to COVID-19 vaccination data. The competition, hosted by DeepNote, requested that participants use data science techniques to build a story focussing on COVID-19 vaccinations, and present an analysis in a creative and attractive manner. Submission topics varied from Twitter sentiment analysis to an in-depth look at the Pakistani vaccination programme. DeepNote is a data science notebook that allows real time collaboration and runs in the cloud.
Fergus and John are currently applying machine learning to carbon capture and sequestration applications for their PhD studies at RCCS. They took this as an exciting opportunity to employ these techniques in a completely different field. Their competition entry looked at what features of a country affected its ability to deploy mass vaccination and they used data from the “CIA world factbook” and “Our World In Data” to this end.
First year PhD student Fergus Mcilwaine commented “It was great to apply some of the tools we use to explore material databases to something completely different. We are really happy with the win as there were many quality entries.”
To see their entry in full please follow this link: https://community.deepnote.com/c/showcase/june-2021-submission-vaccine-race