2/5/2025 Hannah Gainer and Bruce Adams
CS undergraduate Lauren Hyde placed first in the Illinois segment of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) data visualization contest and advanced to the championship round. CS professor Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider won the faculty portion of the award with co-author CS undergrad Louisa Zhang.
Written by Hannah Gainer and Bruce Adams
Sophomore CS major Lauren Hyde has been recognized for her work and named the top student visualization at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as part of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) data visualization contest. “I'm honored to have been chosen out of all the students here to showcase my work.” said Hyde.
By placing first at U. of I., Hyde advanced to Big Ten contest on Monday, February 10, representing Illinois. Hyde said, “I absolutely love Illinois and have had an amazing experience here, so I'm very proud to represent this school in the championship!” The BTAA 2025 Data Viz Championship is an opportunity for students, faculty and staff at Big Ten institutions to showcase their data visualization skills and compete for the BTAA Data Viz Champion title. Students will be challenged to use the U.S. National Park Visit Data (1979-2023) – Responsible Datasets in Context to devise a data visualization to address their chosen question(s).
CS professor Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider says, “In addition to her amazing visualization skills, Lauren is an undergraduate researcher in my d7 research group, presented at the Undergraduate Research Symposium last year as a freshman, and has been the most instrumental person in developing the infrastructure to support our efforts in CS 107: Data Science DISCOVERY become a national leader in Data Science.” “I've been part of a few other initiatives related to data science here at Illinois. I've been involved in developing a lot of the infrastructure for the Data Science Discovery class -- and I'm always happy to find other opportunities in that space, like this contest, because I find it really interesting,” said Hyde. Hyde is also a Mastery Platform developer, volunteers at Hack4Impact, and spent the summer of 2024 as a Software Engineering Intern at PayPal on the enterprise compliance solutions team.
Fagen-Ulmschneider and CS undergrad Louisa Zhang co-authored the winning faculty visualization, Trends in High School GPAs among Incoming Freshman Classes of Big Ten Schools. Zhang is a member of CS STARS and is involved in Hack4Impact, NCSA SPIN, and Product Space on campus. Zhang said, ”I was excited to win the faculty visualization with Prof. Fagen-Ulmschneider. It was such a rewarding experience working on the project together. Seeing all our hard work come together feels amazing, and witnessing the results has been incredibly fulfilling.”
Fagen-Ulmschneider explains “The faculty visualization contest was to ‘use the theme of the Big Ten (e.g., athletics, enrollment data, etc.)’. Working with Louisa, we thought it should be something that students across the Big Ten would be interested in and would want to dive deeper into understanding the data.
“Given the recent frenzy surrounding high schoolers applying to colleges and their GPAs, this felt especially relevant. With no existing dataset tracking GPA trends over time across Big Ten schools, we set out to compile and visualize this data ourselves,” said Zhang.
Fagen-Ulmschneider explains, “We found the Common Data Set (CDS) is, as the name implies, a shared set of questions answered by all Big Ten Universities and published publicly on their various university web pages. Questions C11 and C12 had each university report statistics about the high school GPAs of their incoming freshman classes and no data reports on the trends over the past 20 years were found. To create the visualization, we needed to record the answers to questions C11 and C12 in every single Common Data Set from 2005 to 2023 across all sixteen Big Ten schools — that's over 300 reports, each dozens of pages long, and each formatted slightly differently. Louisa did most of the data collection by digging into each report to extract the data we needed for the visualization.”
Fagen-Ulmschneider continues, “As part of sharing the data behind the data visualization, we also published a Data Science MicroProject for students anywhere to nerd out with the raw data. After going through just a couple of lessons in the University of Illinois' open-access Data Science DISCOVERY web resource, students can create a very similar data visualization in Python using the same dataset that is used in the data visualization that won the Illinois Data Visualization Championship.”
The MicroProject is linked on the visualization page itself, and it is the first MicroProject of the 2025 season of Data Science MicroProjects, found here: MicroProject #01: Trends in High School GPAs.”
“Working on this project has been a great learning experience. This is my second semester working with Professor Fagen-Ulmschneider, and it’s always a lot of fun. Looking ahead, we’re both really excited about the Big Ten competition.” Zhang says, “This project has been a great stepping stone, and I’m eager to see how it will be received on a larger stage. Overall, it’s been a great learning experience, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to be part of something so impactful.”
The BTAA sponsored International Love Data Week started February 10, 2025. Hyde’s interactive visuals for the contest are available at Americans Value National Parks More than Ever. Institutional entries will be posted, by category, on the Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Challenge website, and members of the BTAA community voted for the winner from February 3 through noon, February 14, 2025. The visualization with the most votes for their category will win the Challenge.
UPDATE: The Illinois Data Science student and faculty entries each won their respective B1G Academic Alliance 2025 Data Viz Championships!
Grainger Engineering Affiliations
Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of computer science and is affiliated with Carle Illinois College of Medicine, School of Information Science, Department of Statistics, and a Faculty Fellow, Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning.