In this data challenge, bachelor students from the Business Analytics Bachelor at the University of Amsterdam work on your companies AI and analytics challenges and come up with innovative solutions. Our students are equipped with AI and analytics skills and will design a proof-of-concept solutions.

Key features of the challenge

• Program: Bachelor of Business Analytics 
• Course: Bachelor Thesis - Data Challenges
• Students per team: 3-5 students
• No. of hours spent: 150 hours per student
• Duration: April-June
• Supervision: Student teams are supervised and guided by UvA supervisors
• Deliverables: POCs designed and developed (dashboard, code, algorithm, app) and a presentation/report with project overview.
• Company time investment: 12-16 hours in total (kick-off meeting, bi-weekly progress meetings, final presentation)
• Costs: free of charge

Challenge Examples

The student teams can work on following type of challenges

Predictive algorithms

These project focus on building algorithm to provide predictions. You are expected to provide the students with a usefull dataset of at least 10.000 rows to build these models. Example of models include:

• Forecasting travel patterns for better holiday package pricing strategies.
• Support operations by providing credit risk predictions of clients.
• Prevent out of stock by predicting SKU demand

Optimization & data driven decisions

Optimization projects focus on making choices between alternatives. In these projects algorithms can support these decisions with data. You are expected to provide the students with a useful data regarding the choices and constrains of the problem. Example of possible questions include:

• Develop an algorithm to decide on which location to build health centers in a city.
• Develop algorithms for optimal production planning.
• How to schedule school visits in a museum. 

Information extraction and processing with genAI

GenAI project focus on explore the opportunities of genAI in process augmentation and automation. Typically at least 30 example cases needs to be supplied (eg. reports labelled with the inforamtion to be extrated) for the students set up the pipeline. In addition, a set of data is needed (which may be unlabelled) for testing (eg 100 reports).

• Automatic drawing analysis to extract information from these figures.
• Develop text extraction pipelines for report processing and information extraction from reports. 
• Building agents to analyze reports automatically and build informatoin visualizatoin based on the extracted data

Company requirement

• Any company with an AI and/or data related challenge that fits the scope of a 12-week project for 3-5 students.
• The challenge is related to AI and/or analytics and has business/organizational relevance.
• Data is supplied by partner organization before project start in April
• Scope is suitable for a 12-week project
• Tangible project outcome (for example dashboard, app, data-driven advice, or code in respository)

Project has some level of complexity in terms of for example problem structuring, data, and/or algorithm building

Planning

• March - 2026: Match with students who will work on your project.
• April - June 2026: Students work on the projects and collaborate with you along the way
• 26 June 2026: Final presentations and deliverables presented to you by the students at an event hosted at the University of Amsterdam campus!