KNIME Co-Organizes Student Challenges with Educational Institutions around the Globe

KNIME Co-Organizes Student Challenges with Educational Institutions around the Globe

The KNIME Student Challenges program connects KNIME with professors around the globe to create low-code challenges for their students

The results from the latest call for submmissions are in: Educators from the US, Singapore, Scandinavia, and more, submitted proposals to gain support from KNIME through the first KNIME Student Challenge call of 2025. After close evaluation, twelve finalists were selected.

Veteran collaborators Hamid Ahady (Clark University) and Wenlei Bai (Penn State University) will team up with KNIME for their second Student Challenge this semester.

Professor Ahady will ask his Business Intelligence students to apply AI and analytics techniques to tackle a real-world business problem. The students will explore relationships between diverse data sources and then create models to forecast product and service success, incorporating relevant business context along the way.

Professor Bai will focus on student enrollment analytics: his students will wear the hat of data analysts to identify curriculum changes to make the educational program of a renowned university more effective and compelling.

This semester we also welcome two new US professors to our Student Challenges’ program: Gasan Elkhodari and Rabih Neouchi from the University of Texas at Dallas.

Professors Elkhodari and Neouchi will co-run a student challenge in the format of a hackathon, combining students of their different classes. The project will focus on a real-world churn prediction problem and should be completed in less than two weeks by the students – we foresee much healthy competitiveness here!

Long-time collaborators Henry Leong and Florian Muljono of Republic Polytechnic will be challenging the learners in their diploma course with a tourism topic. While this isn’t a typical challenge topic, it is particularly relevant given RP’s track record and their focus with the School of Hospitality dedicated to this topic.

Together with Ahmed Elragal, Professor at Luleå University of Technology, and Moutaz Haddara, Professor at Kristiania University of Applied Sciences, have approached us with the very appealing proposal to run a workshop/hackathon event for participants of the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) 2025. Participants of the workshop will tackle challenges around the use of LLMs and customizing them via RAG with the help of visual workflows.

We have seen a lot of interest from long-time collaborators in Germany, who would like to make their classes more engaging with team-based challenges.

Stefan Selle from HTW Saar, author of the German text book Data Science Training - Supervised Learning will be testing out the challenge idea in a course targeted at marketing science graduate students. This is made possible by a pretty recent change in the study regulations that allows him to assign bonus points to team-based assessments.

Gero Holthoff, professor for management accounting at THM Business School, is a seasoned KNIME user: In previous years, students of his business analytics course already worked together in teams to solve challenging case studies (as described in this article). For this iteration, we are providing recognition items for the students for an extra chunk of motivation.

Having leveraged KNIME Analytics Platform for several years in undergraduate courses already Melanie Kaiser (TH Ingolstadt) and KNIME are teaming up to challenge the student teams to act as business consultants and work on real cases throughout the term. One of Andreas Englbrecht’s goals for his courses at Hochschule München is a thorough understanding of ML concepts. Hence, the challenge for his class will evolve around finding the best ML model by applying what students have learnt in class.

Patrícia Filipe teaches various classes in the Master’s of Business Analytics of ISCTE Business School, where she has been frequently using KNIME throughout the years (with various guest appearances and joint events). Students in her class will be challenged on the topic of fraud detection, where the students can hone their inner detective.

Blerim Emruli is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Informatics at Lund University. He’s a veteran KNIME user who has integrated it in his courses for a couple of years now, most recently in the AI course INFN65. The kickoff for this student challenge has already happened in late January in form of a guest lecture by Stefan Helfrich.

Stay tuned to learn more about these challenges: once they are completed, we will shed some light on all the winning solutions!