Two graduate students who designed an app to predict future trends in diabetes within the United States were the winners of the MSBAPM & Alteryx Data Challenge earlier this year.

In addition to the $1,000 grand prize for their work, graduate students Hao Zhu and Yingqi Yang were special guests at the company’s annual conference and gala, Inspire 2015, which was held May 17-20 in Boston. They were able to share their work with experts in the field.

Alteryx, a leader in data blending and advanced analytics, specializes in quick turnaround for customers, who include Experian, Kaiser, Ford and McDonald’s. The company is headquartered in Irvine, Calif.

“The most excited thing was the amazing presentations from Alteryx’s sponsors. They used the Alteryx software as a data-analysis tool and presented analyzed results to their clients using data visualization tools,” Yang said. “I learned a lot from those presentations, which showed me the right way to be a good analyst in the real business world.”

Zhu and Yang, who called their group the Outback Team, presented a poster describing their app, which used predictive analyses for adult diabetes based on current trends in the U.S.

“I enjoyed the conference. It was both fun and informative,” agreed Hao Zhu. “It was a great opportunity to expand our network.”

The initial challenge began on March 30 with a three-hour presentation and tool tutorial by the Alteryx team, held at the Graduate Business Learning Center in downtown Hartford. The students had a deadline of April 6 to submit a project which used Alteryx software to analyze, model and visualize data. Six teams entered the competition, which was judged by four senior company executives on April 10. The projects were very diverse, ranging from predictions of individual Walmart store sales to sentiments of residents of different U.S. states toward key issues on Twitter.

Second place went to “The A Team” for its invention of the Alteryx Detective, an app designed to detect unauthorized and suspicious activity in user accounts. The team made use of data blending and mathematical tools available on Alteryx to calculate exact locations of events and capture time stamps to detect anomalies in user activities. The A Team members were: Snehal Joshi, Ryan O’Connor, Yiyao Zhang and Chen Sun.

Third place went to Dylan Blanchard, who used Google location services to capture his location through a period of four weeks to predict his weekly schedule by the use of cluster analyses.

All three winning teams earned interviews for open positions at Alteryx.