In Spring 2025, Clark University and KNIME teamed up to bring hands-on AI learning to the classroom—this time with high stakes. The top prize? A summer internship with Siemens Healthineers for the challenge winners.
Students in Professor Hamid Ahady’s course competed in the “Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Business” challenge, using KNIME to tackle real business problems and create AI-powered applications that would solve or optimize the performance of use cases in different industries.
Knowing that Siemens Healthineers would offer an internship to the first-place team, many student groups focused their AI projects on healthcare-related business use cases.
AI-driven solutions for real problems
The class was split into teams of four who worked on solving or optimizing real-world business problems using visual workflows in the open source KNIME Analytics Platform.
Upon evaluation, three teams stood out:
First place: Disease prediction based on patients’ symptoms
The challenge winners, Aditya Singh, Jai Kumar Sanghi, Prudhvi Rani Kancherla, and Shraddha Surjuse created a diagnosis application to help predict diseases based on patients’ symptoms.
- The problem, modeled as a multi-class classification task, is challenging: Several diseases have similar symptoms, being hard to differentiate; and many of them did not have enough instances in the dataset for robust model training.
- The solution: The students came up with a two-stage approach to simplify the classification task, discussed how different AI models handle class imbalance differently, and also created a user-centric data app with a useful interface for doctors.
Second place: Predicting employee attrition
Anvitaa Anand Patne, Ishwari Yogesh Joshi, Avni Prajapati, and Sara Rehman took on the challenge of predicting employee attrition using a highly imbalanced dataset.
- The problem: The dataset contains two classes (attrition and no-attrition), but the data is imbalanced because there are far more no-attrition instances.
- The solution: The students do a good job at assessing the limitations of their insights, given this data imbalance, and attenuated it with the SMOTE technique. They also implemented different preprocessing and feature selection techniques, efficiently reducing the number of attributes from 44 to 6. The HR insights in their report are very thoughtful and the workflow is well documented.
Third place: Obesity risk prediction
Chiedza Manyumwa, Prapti Dahal, Jemimah Tendo, and Chris Nelson created a data preprocessing and classification pipeline for obesity risk prediction.
- The problem: The dataset they used suffers from severe class imbalance (most instances correspond to non-obese people)
- The solution: By using SMOTE the team was able to develop a robust solution. The insights they derive from their analyses are original and relevant for healthcare professionals.
Recognition and opportunity for the challenge winners
All three top-performing teams received digital badges acknowledging the quality of their work, coupon codes to get all KNIME certifications for free, custom-made trophies, and KNIME gadgets. The first-place challenge winners were awarded a summer internship with Siemens Healthineers, where they’ll take their classroom skills into a real-world corporate environment.
A growing partnership: Clark University and KNIME
This challenge reflects the growing collaboration between KNIME and Clark University. When KNIME opened its first 2025 call for student challenge proposals, Professor Ahady submitted for a second year. Ahady and KNIME collaborated for the first time on a student challenge in 2024 – and the winning students were finalists in the KNIME Game of Nodes competition.
This year’s Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Business challenge was an opportunity for students to learn about low-code and the power of principled AI and data analytics.
We would like to congratulate all students who participated and used KNIME in their projects, and thank Professor Ahady for co-organizing this challenge with us. His commitment to giving students industry-relevant experience has been central to the success of these two initiatives.
From classroom to career with the KNIME Educators Alliance
Challenges like these aren’t just academic exercises, but an opportunity for your students to build their career.
About Clark University: Founded in 1887, Clark University is a renowned private research institution with a legacy of academic excellence and social impact. In over a century, Clark University has cultivated a global network of partnerships with universities, research institutions, and organizations across various fields of study. The School of Business (previously known as School of Management), established in 1982, embodies Clark's commitment to social innovation and responsible business practices. The School of Business offers a multidisciplinary approach, preparing professionals in areas such as business analytics, accounting, finance, marketing, management, and social impact. Clark University's campus features a unique blend of historic and modern architecture, providing advanced teaching facilities, state-of-the-art laboratories, collaborative spaces, and a vibrant intellectual environment for both undergraduate and graduate students.
About Siemens Healthineers: Siemens Healthineers pioneer breakthroughs in healthcare. For everyone. Everywhere. Sustainably. Learn more.
About the KNIME Educators Alliance: The Educators Alliance collaborates with educators to run the KNIME student challenges, bringing gamification into the teaching of data science, analytics, and AI. The challenges take the form of a project, executed individually or in teams, and the best solutions are recognized by an award. Rooted in real-world data, the challenges foster collaboration and constructive competitiveness between learners.