Students from the College of Engineering, School of Business Administration and College of Arts and Sciences at American University of Sharjah (AUS) competed in the First HSBC Coding Challenge, aimed at undergraduate students at the university.

Engineering undergraduate Sheikh Abdur Raheem Ali; and computer engineering master's students, Mohammed Alhusin, and Motamen Monawar; came in first, second and third respectively winning cash prizes of AED 1500, 1000 and 500.

The competition required the 26 competing students to build a Probability of Default (PD) model for Wholesale exposures, which in the field of finance, provides predictions on the likelihood that a borrower will be unable to meet its debt obligations. The target was to create a PD model with a score from 0 to 1000 to identify customers who are more prone to default on their obligations by allocating lower scores to them.

The competition tested the students’ skills in programming, statistics and ability to pick up financial concepts.

“Such a competition is a valuable opportunity for the students to showcase their coding skills applied to real life problems. This collaboration with HSBC is a testimony to the quality of our students,” said Dr. Narjess Bobakri, Professor and Head of the Department of Finance at AUS.

This is the first year that HSBC has held this competition. It plans to hold one every year. HSBC is also considering offering internships to the winners in future editions of the competition.