Nick Pace and Connor Johnson win first place in Virginia Datathon

Nick Pace (BUS ’20, A&S ’21) and Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and School of Computing and Information undergraduate Connor Johnson were on the winning team for the Virginia 2021 Chief Data Officer Datathon. The event brings together state agencies, students, nonprofits and the private sector to leverage technology and data to develop innovative solutions addressing complex problems.

This year’s theme was addressing hunger with bits and bytes. Food insecurity rates across the nation are rising, and in 2018, there were nearly 850,000 food-insecure Virginians, a number that only increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Datathon teams were challenged to develop data-driven solutions to address hunger in the commonwealth by providing actionable insights into how a food system can fuel all Virginians.

"We sought to highlight our belief that there exists a discrepancy in the people who are considered eligible for the SNAP program in Virginia. The current system relies on median income level to determine a person’s eligibility, and we believe that a more extensive model that includes variables such as median household income, average SNAP participation per household, unemployment rate and percentage of minority people in a household does a better job at determining the percentage of people that are food insecure,” said Pace.

You can view the live stream of the entire Datathon. Pace and Johnson's presentation begins at around 19:00; the awards ceremony starts at about 2:57:30.