This is a private hackathon whose primary purpose is for the members of the DSN Ai+ Club Unilag to apply what they have learnt. If you are part of Ai+ Club Unilag contact the club lead for the secret code.

Logistics in Sub-Saharan Africa increases the cost of manufactured goods by up to 320%; while in Europe, it only accounts for up to 90% of the manufacturing cost.

Economies are better when logistics is efficient and affordable.

Sendy, in partnership with insight2impact facility, is hosting a Zindi challenge to predict the estimated time of delivery of orders, from the point of driver pickup to the point of arrival at final destination.

The solution will help Sendy enhance customer communication and improve the reliability of its service; which will ultimately improve customer experience. In addition, the solution will enable Sendy to realise cost savings, and ultimately reduce the cost of doing business, through improved resource management and planning for order scheduling.

Sendy helps men and women behind every type of business to trade easily, deliver more competitively, and build extraordinary businesses.

“We believe in them; we believe that logistics should be an enabler for them to achieve their goals, rather than a hindrance. We believe that everyone should be able to participate and thrive in the economy and that no small business should be left out because the cost of logistics is either too high or inaccessible.”

Data is a critical component in helping Sendy to build more efficient, affordable and accessible solutions. Given the details of a Sendy order, can we use historic data to predict an accurate time for the arrival of the rider at the destination of a package? In this competition, we’re challenging you to build a model that predicts an accurate delivery time, from picking up a package to arriving at the final destination. An accurate arrival time prediction will help all businesses to improve their logistics and communicate an accurate time to their customers.

About DSN Ai+ Club Unilag(twitter.com/aiplusunilag):

DSN Ai+ Club Unilag (University of Lagos, Nigeria) is a branch of Data Science Nigeria Community aimed at building and sustaining Ai talents at the university with the vision #1millionAiTalentsIn10Yrs.

Twitter: @aiplusunilag

YouTube Channel

Email: aiplusclubunilag@gmail.com

About Sendy(sendyit.com):

Sendy is a business-to-business platform established in 2014, to enable businesses of all types and sizes to transport goods more efficiently across East Africa.

The company is headquartered in Kenya with a team of more than 100 staff, focused on building practical solutions for Africa’s dynamic transportation needs, from developing apps and web solutions, to providing dedicated support for goods on the move.

Currently operating in Kenya and Uganda, Sendy is expanding to Nigeria and Tanzania, to enable thousands more businesses to move volumes of goods easily, anywhere, at any time. Sendy aggregates a pool of delivery options from 28 ton, 14 ton, 5 ton trucks to pick up trucks, vans and motorcycles.

“At Sendy, we’re on a mission to change the lives of everyone we touch; from patients who rely on regular medicine at the local pharmacy to farmers who urgently need to move their produce to silos, we are offering a service that African companies can depend on. We are building a platform to tackle logistic challenges that business across Africa face on a day to day basis.”

About insight2impact(i2ifacility.org):

insight2impact (i2i) is a resource centre supporting the use of data for decision-making, with a focus on financial and economic inclusion. i2i is hosted by FinMark Trust and Cenfri and funded by the Gates Foundation in partnership with The Mastercard Foundation.

Teams and collaboration

You may participate in this competition as an individual or in a team of up to four people. When creating a team, the team must have a total submission count less than or equal to the maximum allowable submissions as of the formation date. A team will be allowed the maximum number of submissions for the competition, minus the highest number of submissions among team members at team formation. Prizes are transferred only to the individual players or to the team leader.

Multiple accounts per user are not permitted, and neither is collaboration or membership across multiple teams. Individuals and their submissions originating from multiple accounts will be disqualified.

Code must not be shared privately outside of a team. Any code that is shared, must be made available to all competition participants through the platform. (i.e. on the discussion boards).

Datasets and packages

The solution must use publicly-available, open-source packages only. Your models should not use any of the metadata provided.

You may use only the datasets provided for this competition. Automated machine learning tools such as automl are not permitted.

You may use pretrained models as long as they are openly available to everyone.

The data used in this competition is the sole property of Zindi and the competition host. You may not transmit, duplicate, publish, redistribute or otherwise provide or make available any competition data to any party not participating in the Competition (this includes uploading the data to any public site such as Kaggle or GitHub). You may upload, store and work with the data on any cloud platform such as Google Colab, AWS or similar, as long as 1) the data remains private and 2) doing so does not contravene Zindi’s rules of use.

You must notify Zindi immediately upon learning of any unauthorised transmission of or unauthorised access to the competition data, and work with Zindi to rectify any unauthorised transmission or access.

Your solution must not infringe the rights of any third party and you must be legally entitled to assign ownership of all rights of copyright in and to the winning solution code to Zindi.

Submissions and winning

You may make a maximum of 10 submissions per day. Your highest-scoring solution on the private leaderboard at the end of the competition will be the one by which you are judged.

At the close of the challenge, the top 3 winners will need to send their code to the host of the hackathon for code review.

Zindi maintains a public leaderboard and a private leaderboard for each competition. The Public Leaderboard includes approximately 50% of the test dataset. While the competition is open, the Public Leaderboard will rank the submitted solutions by the accuracy score they achieve. Upon close of the competition, the Private Leaderboard, which covers the other 50% of the test dataset, will be made public and will constitute the final ranking for the competition.

If two solutions earn identical scores on the leaderboard, the tiebreaker will be the date and time in which the submission was made (the earlier solution will win).

You acknowledge and agree that Zindi may, without any obligation to do so, remove or disqualify an individual, team, or account if Zindi believes that such individual, team, or account is in violation of these rules. Entry into this competition constitutes your acceptance of these official competition rules.

Please refer to the FAQs and Terms of Use for additional rules that may apply to this competition. We reserve the right to update these rules at any time.

The 1st , 2nd, 3rd on the final leaderboard will be contacted and surprised by DSN Ai+ Club Unilag.

The error metric for this competition is the Root Mean Squared Error

For every row in the dataset, submission files should contain 2 columns: order_id and Time from Pickup to Arrival (Predicted time in seconds between arrival and Pickup).

Your submission file should look like this:

Order_No                Time from Pickup to Arrival
Order_No_19248          197
Order_No_12736          7533
Order_No_768            768

The competition starts on 23rd May and closes on 30th May 2020.

Final submissions must be received by 3:59 PM GMT.

We reserve the right to update the contest timeline if necessary.