115 Students Compete in Machine Learning to Answer Calls from Vodafone Customers

Contacting a call center and being answered by a digital assistant is not the future, since for many cell phone users it is already the present. The real challenge, however, for telephone companies is to train such assistants so they can juggle different situations and address requests with readiness and flexibility. And this is precisely what, in a nutshell, the 115 Bocconi students who participated in the Vodafone Data Science Hackathon were asked to do. In the end, two teams, PitchEye and (P)RoFiTo, came out on top and were declared winners on Saturday, 20 February. 

The Hackathon was open to teams of students coming from five Bocconi degree programs (both Bachelor and Master programs) and saw participants working for ten days on a dataset provided by Vodafone, with students analyzing a set of real (anonymized) cases relating to actual calls to the customer support center. On the other side of the virtual handset was the digital assistant Tobi. By using machine learning models, the youngsters had the task of proposing predictions that would allow them to improve on the assistant's heuristics, i.e. its ability to react to various situations, and draft a report to explain the methods they had used to solve the problems they encountered. 

"The challenge proposed by the Vodafone team was complex", explains Riccardo Zecchina, Vodafone Chair of Machine Learning and Data Science at Bocconi. "The students had to deal with very complicated time series and make forecasts that were anything but simple". However, “dealing with real data is an extremely formative experience, which pushes us to use knowledge (in this case the learning algorithms to handle large quantities of data) in a creative, computationally efficient and rigorous way. Identifying the important questions that can actually be answered by machine learning is part of the challenge. When you manage to do so, progress is enormous." 

Roberto Bernardelli (PitchEye) is convinced of this, and together with his two team colleagues Guillaume Ferreol and Francesco Inzerillo underlines “the importance for those who study data science to be able to deal with real-world problems and actual data. This challenge was a great opportunity in this sense”. Elia Torre of the (P)RoFiTo team (together with Edoardo Botta and Marco Antonioli) echoes his words, citing basketball star Michael Jordan to summarize their work for the Hackathon: "Talent wins games", he explains, “but teamwork and intelligence wins championships”. All six winners are second-year BEMACS students. 

The winning teams now have the possibility of doing an internship with Vodafone’s Data Science team. Francesca Magrassi, Recruiting & Employer Branding Manager comments: “Vodafone has always focused on young talent and constantly invests in the skills of the future. It is even more important to do it today, in a time of great transformation and evolution, and to do it through a collaboration that is fundamental for us, that with Bocconi University. Once again, we were able to appreciate the preparation and enthusiasm of the young people, whom we look forward to involving in an internship in the coming months, so they can work with the Big Data team and enter the world of work".