All has been quiet on the Kaggle frontpage for the last few weeks, but now [ drumroll, dim lights, audience holds their breath in anticipation ] we are excited to share what we've been working on for the last month.
GE Industrial Internet Quests
The Industrial Internet. The Internet of Things. What does it all mean? In a nutshell, it’s internet-connected devices collecting data and communicating to make industries smarter. This data is then used to anticipate and avoid problems, instead of fixing things after the fact. General Electric, the maker of just about everything, is very interested in this area, so they're sponsoring a series of "Quests" on Kaggle. This is big, you guys.
Flight Quest and Hospital Quest were officially announced this morning at the GE Minds and Machines Conference in San Francisco, and now live on Kaggle at www.gequest.com. The Quests will span several months and submissions will be reviewed and winners selected by evaluation metric for the Flight Quest and a panel of Healthcare experts for the Hospital Quest . There's some tweaks to the regular Kaggle comp format, so be sure to read the rules ( more rules ) and timelines carefully. Winners will receive cash rewards (over $300,000 in prizes between the two Quests, with 1st place in Flight taking home 100K ) as well as the opportunity to have their submission turned into a working simulation, with the ultimate goal of creating an onboard flight management application and hospital patient experience application, supported by GE.
Also Launching in December...
For those looking for a way to give back this holiday season ( and get your work featured on Visual.ly , home of some of the best data viz on the internet), we have a Visualization contest launching next week for education NGO Colorado Succeeds. The Challenge is to use 3 years of data released by the state of Colorado Department of Education to visually uncover trends in the Colorado public school system. As with any Kaggle viz contest, this is about more than just infographics. It's about diving deep into the data to uncover new insights using all the tools in the data science arsenal. There's 5K in prizes for the winners, and all submissions will be evaluated by the Visual.ly team and qualified visualizers will be given admission into the Visual.ly Marketplace for future work. We'll share more details next week when the contest officially launches.
Recent Results
Now for a rundown of the recent competition results. The recruiting comp Facebook II has just ended, but the leaderboard is still in 'fog of war' mode as Facebook reaches out to the top finishers to start setting up interviews for Data Engineer positions. Earlier in November, the US Census Return Rate competition came to a close. First place goes tofodroczy, followed by Not a US Citizen (very cute, Alec), and Yetiman in 3rd ( with a great forum writeup on his techniques ). Finally, in case you missed in, hard-core deep learning with GPUs carried the day in the Merck competition, and has been widely written-up, including a recent piece at the top of the New York Times Science section.
That's all for today. Let the Quests begin!
PS - To Sergey ( you know who you are ). Just in case you were wondering about GE.
