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Three Rowe School MBA students will touch down in Las Vegas this October for the 2016 international Watson Analytics Global Competition, hosted by IBM at its largest annual conference. While Vegas may be all about luck for some, this team—Jordan Cromwell, Saleem Tawakol and Chenyu Yang (pictured L to R above)—will be focused on the same elements that got them there: hard work, ingenuity and know-how.

Dr. Michael Bliemel, professor in the Rowe School of Business and the students’ coach, describes the project that has brought them this far. The challenge of the competition was for graduate students to apply the IBM Watson Analytics program to environmental issues, developing innovative solutions and predictive models. The Rowe students responded with “Carbon Dioxide—Hybrid and Electric Vehicles: The Future through the Eyes of the Present.”

The students, explains Bliemel, came up with new insights by leveraging multiple data sources from hybrid and electric car sales numbers to efficiency ratings to Twitter feeds to historic commodity prices. “These data sources were never combined before, so this was no small feat,” he says. “The data came from government and business systems. The team was able to show the relationships of different dimensions very nicely with interactive visualizations.”

Along with the other finalists—Deakin University in Australia and the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia—Dalhousie is now receiving global attention. Bliemel gives some credit to the Rowe School’s work in data analytics over the past three years, aided by the school’s Rowe gift and by partnerships with IBM Canada and SAP. “We’ve been working closely with leading business analytics providers, developing new curricula to demonstrate the power of self-serve business analytics,” he says. “We have established a leadership position in this area and have several faculty members who are now training faculty across the continent to teach advanced analytics to business students.”

The Rowe team’s project actually grew out of one of Bliemel’s courses, Business Analytics and Data Visualization. This courses includes not only MBA students but also some from the School of Information Management’s Master of Library and Information Studies program, as well as those earning a Master of Electronic Commerce (a joint degree between Computer Science, Law and Management). Courses like this, says Bliemel, prepare students for careers on a new frontier. “Analytics is changing how business decisions are made,” he says. “Our courses teach students how to get data from various sources; they then learn how to transform and load this data into the next generation visualization and data mining tools to support data-driven decisions.” With the knowledge gained from these courses, students “straddle both business understanding and data understanding.”

With applications so relevant to the rapidly changing business world, it’s unsurprising that IBM is interested in the solutions teams like the Rowe’s bring to data and business analytics. Judges for the finals in October include IBM executives who are at the top of the analytics field.

While the Dalhousie community will be crossing its fingers for the Rowe team, Cromwell, Tawakol and Yang will no doubt be dedicating their thoughts to making a strong final showing.