Institut Teknologi Bandung sent two teams as a delegation to participate in this competition. One team even managed to win a title. The team that consisted of Dimas Shidqi Parikesit (Informatics, 2020), Rio Audino (Informatics, 2020), and Rizky Ramadhana (Informatics, 2020) won the Harapan title in the GEMASTIK-XV 2022 in the Data Mining Division.

Before winning the title, Dimas, Rio, and Rizky went through several stages. A few months before this competition, ITB held the ITB Online Hackathon – Pra-GEMASTIK 2022 as a preparation phase for ITB students before entering the actual competition. This internal competition was held in September 2022. Then, the three informatics students participated in the GEMASTIK-XV elimination stage that was themed "Information and Communication Technology for Indonesia's Faster Recovery and Stronger Advancement". In this phase, Rio and his friends must create a research paper with an innovative system as its topic.

Rio and his friends created an early warning system to detect the spread of new diseases in a specific region. They utilized the trend of a specific health-related keyword search from Google Trend. The data they collected can illustrate the dynamic of a health-related issue in an area. "For example, people who wrote 'paracetamol' in Google might be suffering from fever," explained Rizky to the ITB reporter on Monday (20/12/2022).

Their endeavor brought them to the final stage held in November 2022, in Malang, East Java. They were given a group of data from several news sources to be classified, whether positive, neutral, or negative. Dimas explained that this kind of verification system is commonly used in tech companies. One example of this system implementation is to validate ratings and reviews in a product or service, such as when a consumer gives a high rating but with a bad review. There is a mechanism that can validate the inputted data.

Rio and his friends said this GEMASTIK-XV competition not only made them happy and proud because of the title they won but also improved their communication skills and ability to work under pressure. They need good communication skills to convince the judge with their elimination-stage proposal. Moreover, different opinions among team members also created a distinctive challenge. However, they managed to unite their different perspectives into one best decision.

During the GEMASTIK-XV competition, the team was supervised by Dr.techn. Saiful Akbar, S.T., M.T. However, they also consulted a lot with other lecturers from Informatics ITB, one of those is Dr.eng. Ayu Purwarianti, S.T., M.T., who is actively researching text data. In addition to that, their endeavor was also supported by the other ITB contingent.

The three students who are interested in data science have often participated in competitions since their high school year. This common interest encouraged them to participate together. They also plan to participate in other competitions in the future.

Dimas gave a message to other students to keep learning so that they could increase their knowledge. "Learning is not limited to what you can get in college but can also be from reading articles. Little by little slowly it will pile up," said Dimas. They also conveyed that joining many activities can reap many benefits.

Reporter: Hanan Fadhilah Ramadhani (Civil Engineering, 2019)
Translator: Favian Aldilla R (Civil Engineering, 2019)