Facebook is hosting a Kaggle competition in order to identify candidate for a data scientist position. Résumés are so passé when you can just have applicants prove their skills first.
Kaggle has reached an impressive milestone of 100,000 data scientists competing on its online platform. This is due, in part, to Kaggle helping lower the bar for getting started with data science.
GE, an airline and a health system have crowdsourced data science questions using Kaggle and are now paying out $600,000 to winners of two competitions.
Putting the right brains on the right problems is the goal of Kaggle Connect.
EMC’s Greenplum division hopes to encourage users of its Chorus big data application to reach out to the Kaggle community of data scientists to do real-world work. The company also inked partnerships with Gnip and Tableau and open-sourced a version of Chorus.
Several novice programmers who signed up for a free machine-learning class on Coursera have gone on recently to win predictive-modeling competitions. Maybe it’s not that hard to mint new data scientists after all.
NASA and a couple other government agencies have kicked off a series of TopCoder challenges designed to find innovative solutions to the government’s big data problems. The first contest is all about making disparate, incompatible data sets usable and actually valuable across agencies.
Carter S. won his first-ever Kaggle competition — our own GigaOM WordPress Challenge — using a brute force method of data science he calls overkill analytics. Rather than spend untold hours perfecting complex models, Carter used simple algorithms and let powerful microprocessors do the rest.
Data science competition platform Kaggle is opening up the leaderboards for its invitation-only private competitions, meaning anyone can watch and see how the world’s best data scientists are faring in these special challenges. Can data science actually become a spectator sport in the analytics community?
In publishing, there’s a constant struggle to determine who’ll read what posts, what the ideal headline might is and when is the best time to publish. GigaOM is teaming with Splunk to find some answers via a Kaggle competition worth a total of $25,000 in prizes.
