A team of graduate business analytics students from the Naveen Jindal School of Management competed recently in the Data 4 Good case competition, organized by Purdue University in collaboration with Microsoft, Prediction Guard and INFORMS. They finished first in the Midwest Region and fifth overall.
The team, named Data Dynasty, consisted of Dinesh Raj Eswaran, Rohit Ramesh Kumar, Pushkar Nagpal and Jasmine Nguyen. They took home a $2,000 prize for their efforts.
The case was a real-world problem in which participants were tasked with translating doctor patient conversations and doctor dictations to form data to extract information such as patient name, symptoms, precautions and what prescription was advised, Nagpal said.
“This case completion was all about being able to use the power of LLMs (Large Language Models) such as ChatGPT-3.5 or Llama2 to simplify a cumbersome process for patient medical information entry into the system,” he said.
The team’s solution was to process the provided transcripts, translate the data in multiple languages and then incorporate text-completion application programming interfaces (APIs) for LLMs to engineer a prompt which could handle a custom JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) response — a text format that stores and transports data. The patient responses were then processed by providing detailed prompts.
“The main point of difference was the prompt engineering done here,” Nagpal said. “The prompt provided to the LLM makes or breaks the solution and it was important to provide a clear prompt which included the data to be used for answers, hyperparameters tuned, handling special cases such as John and Jane Doe for unnamed patients, and instructions and examples for the LLM to work its magic. We were able to achieve 3rd place overall in terms of the accuracy of our results using the framework we developed.”
As a regional winner, the UTD team was invited to Purdue University Dec. 1 to present their work to a panel of judges from Purdue, Microsoft, Prediction Guard and INFORMS.
Nagpal said the team will take all the feedback in a constructive way, build on their skillset, continue to participate in such competitions and bring more success to UTD.
Gaurav Shekhar, assistant dean for graduate programs at the Jindal School and director of its MS Business Analytics Flex and Online programs, said competitions are necessary for students as they provide an accelerated medium to vet their knowledge.
“Our students are very competitive, and their success at competitions like this is testimony to the fact that we have a great mix of faculty and students who can solve some of the most complex problems in the world,” he said. “We didn’t get here just like that. Years of intentional work went into creating quality programs by hiring the top faculty and researchers, supported by high-quality staff, so our students learn from the best. A big chunk of appreciation goes to our students who have made active participation and success as part of their DNA.”
