More in the Big Data vein. Just spectacular.
Kaggle is a platform where companies, researchers and governments can host competitions to help solve huge data-related problems. About 50 competitions have been run to date and members take just days to solve problems that have stumped scientists for years.
"To date Kaggle has crunched data on dark matter, predicting which used cars are likely to be bad buys, improve the World Chess Federation's official chess rating system, and predicting the likelihood that an HIV patient's infection will become less severe, given a small dataset and limited clinical information," Kaggle claims.
[Founder Anthony Goldbloom] spoke to many CIOs who all said they wanted to do more predictive modelling but their enthusiasm didn't match actual adoption. Goldbloom concluded that the problem was that the product was too technical and the barriers to entry too high."I just became obsessed," said Golbloom. "It was so much better than trying to predict unemployment next month and getting it wrong."
via From Bondi to the big bucks: the 28-year-old who’s making data science a sport
The title of this post, of course, refers to a contest by Netflix some years ago.
The ideas of competition, wisdom of crowds, and cross-disciplinary analysis themselves are not particularly new but the application of these ideas to big data analytics is new, driven by advances in storage, parallel processing, cloud computing, etc, and by the increasing imperative for organisations to be smarter about what they do with the data they possess.
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