Machine Learning and Data Science master students Wuyou Shu, Zeyu Zhang and Xiaoxiao Huang won first place Monday at MLDS AI Hackathon 2025 for their team’s project addressing scouting challenges for Chicago Fire FC.
Winning $800, eight tickets for Chicago Fire’s 2026 home opener and a tour of Endeavor Health Performance Center, Shu said his team’s project includes artificial intelligence that can generate a report and do data visualization for the soccer team, as well as a chat box that can analyze the report.
“The thing that is important is the idea,” Shu said. “We are actually building an amalgamated reporter, like a soccer player scout reporter, so that’s our core idea, which we believe is novel.”
Master of Science in MLDS Associate Director Stephen Dowling said MLDS’s previous hackathons were exclusive to MLDS students, but this year the event was open to students from any department, program or year.
Weinberg freshman Adrian Lin saw a poster for the hackathon at the gym and asked McCormick freshman Nathaniel Potter to join his team. On Friday, when the hackathon kicked off, they received a huge dataset with “millions of rows” of data on soccer players.
Lin and Conner presented their project, “Scouting, Coaching, Output, Recruitment, Evaluation system” as a machine learning solution to analyze player valuation, performance forecasting and player development.
“The project is constructing three AI models, basically to cover each of the three objectives, and then build a unified dashboard so that for someone that’s non-technical, it’s easier for them to plug in data and figure out the output,” Lin said. “It’s really geared towards making data presentable and capturing trends that are otherwise difficult to see.”
Each of the seven teams had 10 minutes to present and demonstrate their solution to the judges. During presentations, students typed prompts into their machine learning solution to demonstrate how their project could be used — from generating training plans for specific players to evaluating current rosters and teams’ needs.
Judges — McCormick Prof. Alice Zhao, McCormick Prof. Evan Boyd, Chicago Fire FC Software Engineer David Portugal, MLDS Systems Administrator Mateusz Ryczek and MLDS master’s student and Northwestern’s Men’s Soccer Director of Analytics Jordan Betterman — then asked teams questions. For example, Zhao asked if a project could compare players, and Betterman asked a team how their model calculated players’ predicted market value.
Teams were evaluated on their project’s innovation, business value and feasibility, technical implementation and effective use of data, according to second-year MLDS student and MLDS’s Student Advisory Board President Daeun Ji. Ji worked to organize this year’s Hackathon.
“Last year, I attended as a participant, not on a planning committee, but at the time I learned a lot of coding, but the most important thing I learned was how to present,” Ji said. “I think people can learn how to deliver their ideas well while using a great technical skill.”
From finding Chicago Fire FC to sponsor the Hackathon to ordering food for attendees, Dowling said the event was almost exclusively student-run and organized.
“It’s a great way to bring people from all around campus who are interested in data and analytics and machine learning to put their skills to the test with other students around Northwestern,” he said.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated MLDS’ program title and Dowling’s title. The Daily regrets the error.
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