UCD Student Team Wins Runner-Up for Technical Excellence at the Data4Good Festival
A team of five second-year BSc Computational Social Science students from University College Dublin has secured Runner-Up for Technical Excellence at the hosted by the (opens in a new window)Hertie School from 20–22 January 2025. At a three-day event, 70 students from 20 European universities gathered to network and create solutions to data challenges.
Competing at the three-day Hackathon in Berlin, the ‘Byte Me’ team, consisting of Harry Alderton, Eoin Curtis, Emma Fowler, Kilian Plapp, and Noah Porter, developed Knowledge Link. This online tool uses Large Language Models to make complex social data more accessible and actionable for policymakers and researchers.
The challenge posed by the Hackathon organisers was finding innovative ways to enhance public access to (opens in a new window)Wegweiser Kommune, a large dataset containing detailed demographic and economic indicators from German regions. While rich in information, this dataset can be challenging to navigate without technical expertise. Knowledge Link simplifies the process by allowing users to create easy-to-understand reports on highlights and key trends.
Pictured (from left to right): Noah Porter, Emma Fowler, Kilian Plapp, Eoin Curtis, and Harry Alderton
“Our goal was to bridge the gap between raw data and real-world decision-making,” said Eoin Curtis. Emma Fowler added, “we wanted to create a tool that policymakers, researchers, and even the general public could use without needing advanced data skills.”
By leveraging AI and natural language processing, the team made the dataset more accessible, reducing the time and effort required to extract meaningful insights. Kilian Plapp explained, “There’s no shortage of data, but if people can’t interpret it, it’s not much use. Our platform attempts to unlock valuable information stored in large datasets.”
The team’s achievement at the Data4Good Hackathon showcases how computational social science can transform policymaking by making data-driven insights more accessible. Building on Knowledge Link, the group plans to develop and validate a more advanced tool for the Irish context, allowing citizens, researchers, and policymakers to extract social and political information from large-scale administrative datasets.
Learn more about the UCD’s BSc Computational Social Science here.