A team from the Web Mining Lab of the Department of Media and Communication (COM) at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) won three awards in the annual competition of Big Data & Computer Intelligence, organised by the China Computer Federation (CCF-BDCI 2017).

Shen Anqi, a COM graduate, Duan Zening and Yin Chuang, both COM students, teamed up to win the First-place Award on “Opinion Mining in the Sino-India Doklam Stand-off Event”, one of 12 designated themes; and the Best Award in Creation and Discovery in the final competition.

Under the designated theme, the team analysed related articles on social media platforms at different stages of the Sino-India Doklam Stand-off Event, to keep track of the relative popularity and change in mainstream perspectives.

Chair Professor Jonathan Zhu Jianhua, supervisor of the team, received the Outstanding Faculty Advisor Award.

Professor Zhu pointed to three ingredients for success: “algorithms are very important because they are the entry ticket to the competition; data is even more important because it tells the story; and theory is the most important of all because it is the soul of the story.”

CCF-BDCI is the largest computing contest in China. CCF-BDCI 2017, the fifth in the series, attracted more than 6,600 teams from China and overseas. Of the 15,000 participants, the overwhelming majority were computer scientists or engineers. The competition lasted for three months and ended on 24 December in Changshu, China.