A team of U of T students won first place at the sixth iteration of the University of Toronto IMI Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Competition on Saturday, March 22, 2025. The competition is hosted by the University of Toronto Institute for Management & Innovation (IMI) at the University of Toronto Mississauga Campus (UTM).
Team members include CivMin graduate students Sebastian Villada Rivera (CivMin MASc student), Mwendwa Kiko (CivMin PhD student), Timotéo Frelau (CivMin PhD student) and Hesam Rashidi (CivMin PhD student) and Computer Science student Jacob Klimczak (Year 3 CompSci).
The team presented their Agent-based simulation and contrastive denoiser model thesis at the finalist presentation at the Innovation Complex at UTM. Alongside the finalist presentation, the team also competed in the poster competition, showcasing their work to a general audience. The team finished first in both the finalist competition and the poster competition, winning a total of $15,500. The event offers a total prize payout of $30,000 for competitors.
The competition, primarily sponsored by Scotiabank, invites undergraduate and graduate students across all the University of Toronto to showcase their capabilities in computational science, math, and statistics. As part of the competition, students develop cutting-edge machine learning models to support financial institutions and law enforcement in the fight against financial crime. The theme of this year’s competition was “identifying anomalies in financial data”, where competing teams were tasked with developing novel solutions to detect anomalies in synthetic customer data. Over 350 students across 72 teams registered in the competition.