PALO ALTO, Calif., March 04, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Denodo, a leader in data management, announced that the winner of the latest Denodo University Challenge, Data for Social Change: Improve Life Expectancy, is the Data Shoe team from Dauphine University, in Paris, France, with members Dounia Bouloudene (captain), Nassim Fatmi, and Youcef Azouaoui (The page hyperlinked above includes a video, supplied by Data Shoe, that showcases the winning solution). Additionally, the Universidade da A Coruña, in Spain, was awarded a prize for contributing the most teams to this competition.

The Denodo Academic Program prepares students through virtual, self-paced training modules, live workshops, and a free version of the Denodo Platform. The latest University Challenge, announced in September of last year, put teams of students through the paces as they raced to build the most effective solution for leveraging data and analytics to improve ESG practices and ultimately life expectancy.

The Data for Social Change: Improve Life Expectancy challenge required students to integrate views of data sources, both supplied and student-identified, to correlate life expectancy with a variety of factors and draw conclusions. The challenge required students to analyze the data using reporting and/or visualization tools and build graphs and other representations to present their findings.

The winning team, Data Shoe, demonstrated that improving healthcare access, reducing air pollution, and fostering political stability are critical to the improvement of life expectancy, and that advancing public policies in these areas can drive not only significant social progress, but also better quality of life, globally. To solve this Challenge, the Data Shoe team identified, accessed, and integrated publicly available data related to air pollution and political stability.

The judges also determined that Data Shoe did an excellent job of explaining the metadata created in the Denodo Platform using the Denodo Design Studio and providing a clear narrative in their Microsoft Power BI report, along with easy-to-understand visuals. The team’s conclusions were well supported by their analysis.

Dounia spoke for the whole team when she said, “The Denodo University Challenge taught us how to think strategically about solving complex data integration problems by efficiently using the Denodo Platform, with the aim of retrieving relevant insights from raw data. Our biggest challenges were choosing the best way to optimize our approach and finding the most valuable data sources, but teamwork and perseverance allowed us to overcome them.”

“I was extremely proud of the level of professionalism that the Data Shoe team brought to this competition,” said Alberto Pan, chief technology officer at Denodo. “Working together, they demonstrated the importance of good data, enhanced through a semantic layer, to answer questions about longevity in a clear, defensible way. The Denodo Platform’s logical data management capabilities, such as support for low code/no code development, makes it easy for students and those without extensive data management experience to rapidly learn the platform and develop solutions. The Data Shoe team leveraged these capabilities to quickly build a robust, well-designed solution.”

The next Denodo University Challenge, focused on AI, is open for pre-registration starting today.

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Denodo is a leader in data management. The award-winning Denodo Platform is the leading logical data management platform for delivering data in the language of business, at the speed of business, for all data-related initiatives across the organization. Realizing more than 400% ROI and millions of dollars in benefits, Denodo’s customers across enterprises in 30+ industries all over the world have received payback in less than six months. For more information, visit denodo.com.