Spears School of Business

The accolades continue to roll in for the Master's in Business Analytics and Data Science (MS BAnDS) program at Oklahoma State University. Competing against the nation’s top schools at the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) Annual Conference & Expo, a team of Spears School of Business students took home top honors in the prestigious Student Data Analytics Competition.

 

The IISE Annual Conference & Expo is the biggest event in the industrial engineering field, and it brought thousands of industry professionals and college students from all undergraduate and postgraduate levels to Atlanta for four days of innovative discussions, networking and top-level competitions. 

 

The OSU team of Edgar Castillo, Bennett Frohock, Mahla Hosseini and Hamed Hemmati took down a star-studded field of 21 teams from the U.S., Canada, Singapore and China to earn the top prize.

 

“I am incredibly proud of our students' achievements at this prestigious conference,” said Dr. Goutam Chakraborty, director of the MS BAnDS program. “This is the first time we participated at the IISE, and walking away with first place in a tough competition is a testament of the hard work by the students and the faculty who prepare them to compete nationally.”

 

This year's competition was the Nursing Home Time-Series Data Prediction Triathlon. Armed only with a data set from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, students were tasked with helping a nursing home develop intelligent staffing, hiring and HR decisions. The competition provided students with the opportunity to learn, showcase and enhance their data analysis and visualization skills with a real-world problem. 

 

The Spears Business MS BAnDS team advanced to the finals to take on three other universities represented entirely by Ph.D. students - Georgia Tech Institute of Technology, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mississippi State University. 

 

“This competition pushed us beyond our expectations,” said Castillo. “It wasn’t just about building a model, but about solving a real-world challenge with real impact. With new CMS regulations requiring minimum nurse staffing, predicting staffing needs became more critical than ever. Our goal was to develop a solution that would help nursing homes balance efficiency with quality care.

 

“Winning this competition is an incredible honor. We’re proud to represent Oklahoma State University and see our hard work pay off. We especially want to thank Dr. Chakraborty, whose support has been invaluable throughout this process. His dedication to student growth, both personally and professionally, makes opportunities like this possible, and we’re deeply grateful for his encouragement and leadership within this amazing program.”

 

Castillo attributed the team’s success to their ability to uncover key insights – some intentionally hidden to make the challenge even tougher. From there, the squad built their database and tested over 20 machine learning models before selecting the strongest performer.

 

In the final round, the team refined the model and delivered a strong presentation, demonstrating the platform’s practical applications through a BI dashboard and an alert system designed to flag staffing issues. This illustrated the team’s ability to translate complex data into clear, actionable insights using the power of storytelling. 

 

This is just the latest honor for the OSU MS BAnDS program. In the spring, Spears Business teams placed first and second at the University of South Carolina’s Big Data Health Science Student Case Competition. In the fall, OSU claimed a national championship at Purdue University’s Data 4 Good Case Competition, and OSU students won two Best Presentation awards at the 2024 MidWest SAS Users Group Conference.

 

Long considered one of the nation’s premier programs, OSU’s MS BAnDS program earned the No. 2 spot in Fortune.com’s Best Master’s in Data Science for 2025 rankings. The program climbed 11 spots since last year to achieve its best ranking ever, just behind top-ranked Harvard University. Click here to learn more about OSU’s MS BAnDS program.