Inviand Masters

Inspiration

We selected the Inviand project, because we wanted to give ourself a little challenge. As 2 Engineers and a Economics major, we are all not super skilled in the subject of chemistry and especially coding enzyme commission numbers. We decided to take on a harder challenge as we believe we work better in environments that make us feel not in our safe zone. Doing this, we learn different things that we have never learn before and experiment with new platforms and frameworks we have never previously worked with. Our inspiration for this project is to make us feel accomplished and not complete this hackathon just for the prize but for us to learn something new and have a better range in our coding abilities so we continue to be successful in our future journeys. Furthermore, after reading the introduction and description of the Inviand project, we were really amazed as the study of enzymes is important to help combat enzyme disorders to better understand how to keep humans healthy.

What it does

This program utilizes and makes use of machine learning algorithms capable of evaluating chemical reactions written in SMILES (Standardized Text Language for Chemical Reactions). This allows for us to find features unique to each reactant and product. From this, our machine learning systems can detect patterns and accurately predict future chemical reaction’s EC numbers and use it for further studies.

How we built it

Used many technologies and libraries such as: Google Colab Pandas Numpy Transformers PyTorch RDKit ChemBERTa SKLearn SVM

Challenges we ran into

Originally, our team consisted of 4 members, one being a graduated electrical engineering student who was very familiar with the various aspects of machine learning and data science. This person was a large asset to our team as she already had a general idea of how we would move forward in our project from the very beginning. The three of us could also see her as a mentor and leader, being an older graduated engineering student, while we were simply first years.

On the morning of the second day of the hackathon, our forth team member who we really relied on guiding us towards successfully completing this hackathon unfortunately felt symptoms of the COVID 19 virus and tested positive later in the afternoon. She felt terribly sick and decided to opt out of the hackathon. After our “leader” in our group left, we had to figure out how to take matters into our own hands. We had to rewrite the entire code from scratch as it simply got too messy and she used some methods we were unfamiliar with.

The three of us had to understand the entirety of the code so we had to redo it in such a small amount of time. This took a large amount of time and manpower, so working overtime at night just before tomorrow's presentations was a struggle. In addition to that, most of the concepts we were faced with we have never faced before and had to watch a lot of videos on how to use a bunch of new stuff especially with ⅔ members never doing a hackathon and one of our members only having done one hackathon

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was the first very big project we did as a team and we are proud of actually being able to complete this hackathon and submitting our work and having the code to work all by ourselves as well as great help from the mentors. We are so happy that we learnt so much about machine learning and data science. Even though now we know how hard it was, we are all very happy with the skills we have gained from this project and how we can implement our skills into future hackathons or other projects that involve machine learning and data science. Furthermore, we are also so grateful that this hackathon gave us the opportunity to talk to Inviand mentors that complimented us on ways we attempted to solve the problem.

What we learned **

While completing the hackathon, we have learnt several crucial lessons as a team. When our oldest team member who we saw as a valuable leader got sick and had to opt out of the competition, we neverlized the large hole he would have left as he was such an important team member. It was a little difficult for us as we all were very new to the content and did not necessarily have a solid understanding of how we would approach the situation. We were forced to redo all our code in less than 10 hours. The other three of us were able to effectively communicate and work together properly. A lesson that we learnt would be that effective teamwork and communication is crucial for any team.

What's next for Inviand Masters **

In the future, as a team we want to continue attending hackathons and use the knowledge we have had previously and the current knowledge we have gained from this hackathon to better improve ourselves in the future. We are really invested and interested in making new projects in the future and experimenting with new languages or frameworks and grasp as much as we can of the idea of computer science, data science and coding as a whole. We are very optimistic for the future and we are happy with all the things we have so far learnt in this hackathon and we are excited to use our current knowledge in the future when we graduate university and go into our own workfields.