The Department of Computer Science and Information Technology (CS&IT) at NED University of Engineering and Technology has held DataQUEST 2026, a data science competition that was organized through its Data Insight Society under TECH FEST 2026. The department invited students from universities across Karachi and Pakistan to take part, which made the event open to aspiring data scientists beyond its own campus. DataQUEST is described by the department as a data science hackathon, and it is held every year by the society as part of the technology festival of the university. The 2026 edition was sponsored by NextGenI, and it brought together teams that were asked to apply their technical expertise and problem solving skills to real world data science challenges.
The hackathon track of the event carried the theme From Trusted Data to Intelligent Decisions: Building AI That Pakistan Can Trust, according to the listing for HACK INSIGHT, which the department used for the participation of the teams. The listing names the faculty of the Data Science group in the department as the judges, who are Dr. Muhammad Umer, Faculty Head of Data Science, together with Wajih Uddin, Mehar Fatima and Hamnah Umar. The theme places the focus on the reliability of the data that is used to train systems and on the decisions that are made with their help, which are central questions for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) in the country.
Team Zeera Plus secured the first position at the competition. One of its members is Fawaz Ahmed, a student of the MS Artificial Intelligence program at the School of Mathematics and Computer Science (SMCS) at IBA Karachi, and the school announced the result and congratulated him and his team. The win shows that students from other universities of Karachi took part in the event and competed successfully against the participants from NED. The department also shared a group photograph of the participants and the Data Insight Society team, and it thanked the society for its hard work and dedication, and encouraged participants to keep learning and to support one another.
Data Insight is a student club of the Department of CS&IT at NED, which was inaugurated on March 6, 2024, along with four other clubs, namely Ledger League, Gameverse, AI Alliance and Qubits Qrew. The club has used DATAQUEST as its main event, and an earlier edition was held as part of TechFest’25, so the 2026 competition continues a series of data science hackathons that the society has organized for students. With participants from several universities, a sponsor from industry and a theme about trustworthy AI, DataQUEST 2026 gave students a platform to test their data science skills on practical problems during TECH FEST 2026.
Follow the SPIN IDG WhatsApp Channel for updates across the Smart Pakistan Insights Network covering all of Pakistan’s technology ecosystem.
