26 January 2023

Yesterday the Erasmus Thesis Awards took place at the Erasmus University Rotterdam campus. Sven Tellemanns, graduate from the Business Information Management master at RSM took home the grand prize of 1000 euro. His model on stock market prediction really impressed the judges and the audience. in terms of depth, novelty and creativity. Sven took a novel approach based on encoding stock market data covering 10 years into 1.41 million multichannel images, enabling the use of new model architectures in the financial domain. 

The goal of the Erasmus Thesis Awards is to celebrate data & AI talent at the EUR, and to bring together data & AI researchers and practitioners. Next to this the goal is to help prepare young talent for a career that nowadays most definitely will involve data and AI, to see how to apply these in a well thought out, effective, but also ethical way.

Four recent EUR graduates, nominated by their respective master programmes, had the chance to present their research and especially the applicability of their findings to a jury of data & AI experts from industry, the wider academic community and to current EUR students.

Of course, the jury looked at the depth of the analysis and the application of data science methods, but the pitch and the business potential and/or societal impact where just as important.

Next to this a key element of the competition was answering the audience questions from the diverse EUR Data & AI related researchers and students.

The other participating nominees were: Rowan Doesburg, recent graduate Data Science and Marketing Analytics at ESE, Stan Hennekes, recent graduate of Econometrics at ESE, Mathijs Barendse, recent graduate Business Analytics and Management at RSM, who already won the selections in their own master programmes.

Their research focused on current topics like: customer recommendations using neural networks in retail and spotting anomalies in forensic data via machine learning. The effectiveness, applicability, but especially also the ethical aspects were thoroughly discussed.

The Erasmus Thesis Awards are made possible by the Erasmus Centre for Data Analytics, Maeur and the academic and student community around data & AI at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Seven’s thesis coaches where: dr. Philipp Cornelius and dr. Tayfun Kucukyilmaz from RSM, Erasmus University Rotterdam.