About the challenge

Project Name: Enhanced Emissions Estimates for ESG Data Completeness

Use Case Summary: Many companies do not report complete greenhouse gas emissions (Scope 1, 2, and 3), leaving significant gaps in ESG data used by investors for decision-making and compliance. This project proposes developing a more accurate and reliable system for estimating emissions for non-reporting companies, aiming to improve current backtesting performance (currently in the high 70% range). The initiative would leverage internal and external data sources (e.g., revenues, employees, industry, country, ESG scores) to generate robust emissions estimates. The dataset will be obfuscated to protect from privacy & MNPI concerns.

Event Schedule:

Date	Day	Event Format	Start Time	End Time
21 Nov 2025	Friday	In-Person (mandatory)	09:00	18:00
22 Nov 2025	Saturday	Students may collaborate offline. Mentors might not be available.
23 Nov 2025	Sunday	Students may collaborate offline. Mentors might not be available.
24 Nov 2025	Monday	Virtual	10:00	10:45

Event Schedule: November 21, 2025, in-person at Fitch Chicago office located at 1 N Wacker Dr, Chicago.

9:00 - 9:30	Registration and Breakfast
9:30 - 10:00	Presentation by Hugo Sancen
10:00 - 10:30	Team Assignments and Mentor introductions
10:30	Codeathon Begins
12:30 - 1:00	Lunch
1:00 - 1:30	Presentation by Fitch Recruitment
1:30 - 5:30	Codeathon continues
5:30	Dinner

About Fitch Group

Fitch Group: A Global Leader in Financial Information Services, Fitch Group operates in over 30 countries and is a prominent provider of financial information services. The group comprises three primary divisions:

Fitch Ratings: A global leader in credit ratings and research.
Fitch Solutions: A leading provider of credit market data, analytical tools, and risk services.
Fitch Learning: A preeminent training and professional development firm.

With dual headquarters in London and New York, Fitch Group is owned by Hearst.

Requirements

Participation and Team Structure

Participants will be organized into teams of four to five members.
Each team is expected to design and develop a conceptual solution that addresses the challenge.

What You Will Submit

1. A URL to a public GitHub repo that will contain the following:
  - Data Science Notebook + Readme.md with detailed thought process on
    - Problem understanding and setting the Hypothesis
    - Exhaustive EDA-trying to understand the pain points in the data given
    - Data Engineering ,handling the messy data
    - Model Selection and your intuition behind the models selected and Experimentation
    - Model Tweaking and hyper parameter tuning shows the command over the model selected
    - Evaluation and how it ties down to the business
  - Please make sure no passwords, api keys or access tokens etc. are checked into the GitHub repo.
  - A submission.csv file with your predictions in the format matching the example in notebooks/submission.csv
  - Wireframes mockups or storyboards for the application, if anything like that was produced(optional).

2. A video presentation, not exceeding 5 minutes, explaining how your team approached solving the problem, including details of the model, and demonstration of the notebook. The video should be uploaded to YouTube, and the public link shared with the organizers via Devpost.

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

2 non-cash prizes

Apple Ipad

5 winners

Winning team will all get an Ipad

Amazon Echo Studio

5 winners

Runner up team will each get an Amazon Echo Studio

Judges

Hugo Sancen
ESG Data Product Owner/ Sustainable Fitch

Derek Ferguson
CSO, FitchGroup

Judging Criteria

Presentation Video
A 3-5 minute presentation video needs to be included.
Github repository
All the codebase needs to be committed to a github repository and needs to be submitted as part of the solutions.

UBS Tower (Floor 23)	Invite only
2 non-cash prizes	78 participants

FitchGroup Codeathon '25 - Drive Sustainability using AI - Chicago (Hybrid)