A team of three UCI students — Physics Ph.D. candidate Dylan Green, physics and math major Tasneem Nora Khokhar and applied physics major Naol Tulu — placed first in the Observable Data Jam held on Oct. 11.
The team was rewarded with $3000 and presented their work at an Observable Insight conference following the release of the results.
Publicly launched in 2018, Observable is a platform that allows people to work with data sets and collaborate on coding online. The 2022 data jam — the first one ever — allowed the company to market their platform, as participants of the jam created and worked on their projects on Observable.
“It was pretty much a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing because my professor announced it a week and a half beforehand, and he [told us] we could participate if we like,” Khokhar said. “Our professor, Dr. David Kirkby, is an ambassador with Observable — it’s pretty new and [works with] a higher level-programming language.”
The Observable platform utilizes JavaScript — a programming language that requires more work to be manually input by users — in comparison to Python — another language that uses assumptions to help complete code.
“Sitting down and spending a couple hours analyzing the data and trying to figure out what we’re trying to get out of it and just talking about it was pretty interesting,” Tulu said. “It’s also interesting to see how many different things you can get out of a single data set.”
The data jam began on Oct. 11 and ran until Oct. 17. On day one, Observable published 12 data sets from the U.S. Department of Education, and participating teams were tasked with turning the data into a topic and presenting on what the data supported. UCI’s team, named “Koi Pond,” used the given data sets to create their final product, “Do Biases in the Education System Explain the Income Wealth Gap?”
“We sat in a cubicle with a whiteboard and thought, especially considering the socio-political economic situations now, and the progress that we’re making towards it, why not apply that social justice onto these data sets?” Khokhar said. “We came up with the idea that we want to see whether we’re making progress in the sense of our education for all demographics — for gender, race [and] ethnicity — [and] that’s how we got our idea.”
Khokhar, who immigrated to the states four years ago, spoke on how the topic of social biases have personally influenced her throughout her time here at UCI.
“It’s been a very eye-opening journey to be here,” Khokhar said. “I’m from Malaysia, [where] everyone is treated the same. Here, I notice that it matters what you look like, what your ethnicity is [and] what you believe in. For me and for a lot of other people, we’ve definitely had to face more hurdles and are not given certain opportunities [because of] our demographic.”
According to Tulu, Observable plans to continue hosting data jams as their company grows.
“It was a fun experience, and I don’t think it was too hard,” Tulu said. “The competition itself was mostly JavaScript and analyzing data — I wouldn’t say a specific class [I’ve taken at UCI] helped me, just the way of thinking you learn from some classes in general [aided me].”
Overall, the team spoke positively about their experience with the data jam.
“I would definitely recommend people — even if you don’t have any programming experience — take a look at these kinds of things when they come up. They can be good experience and good resume builders if you’re looking for things like that.”
Andie San Luis is a Campus News Intern for the fall 2022 quarter. She can be reached at asanlui1@uci.edu.
