Call for competitions
Anthony Goldbloom
allows companies, researchers, government and other organizations to
post their modeling problems and have data professionals and
researchers compete to produce the best solutions. Kaggle offers data
professionals and researchers the opportunity to test their skills,
try their techniques on interesting datasets and enhance their
professional reputations.
Kaggle is launching its first competition in early March and is
looking to host others. To test drive the Kaggle platform, visit
http://demo.kaggle.com. If you would like more information about the
project, or if you are interested in hosting a competition on Kaggle,
email anthony....@kaggle.com.
Additional information:
The Kaggle platform lowers the barriers to hosting data-related
competitions by allowing companies, researchers and other
organizations to host contests without having to build their own
infrastructure or worry about maintenance headaches such as down time,
patching software, slow download speeds and the security and privacy
of competitors' information. Competition organizers can simply supply
the details of their competition (including any relevant data and
evaluation algorithm), preview the competition before launch and then
have data professionals and researchers lodge solutions. Best of all,
it costs nothing to host a competition on Kaggle (even bandwidth is
covered).
The platform is easy to use. Competition organizers can paste pre-
formatted content onto their pages using a what-you-see-is-what-you-
get (WYSIWYG) editor. There are pages set aside for displaying a
competition's rules, background, submission instructions, help,
evaluation methodology and prizes. Kaggle also supports two additional
fully customizable pages and permits competitions to have their own
human-friendly URL (eg www.kaggle.com/mycompetitionURL).
When entering a competition, Kaggle allows contestants to form teams
and lodge submissions. Submissions can be validated to ensure that
they have been formatted correctly. For numerical submissions, Kaggle
can ensure that submissions have the correct number of rows and that
all rows have allowable values. The platform can evaluate submissions
instantaneously and add a team directly to a leaderboard (Kaggle
currently offers root-mean-squared-error and area-under-the-ROC-curve
evaluation methods, but its modular design allows competition-specific
evaluation algorithms to be added).
In many cases, data-related competitions involve large data files. To
ensure blistering download speeds regardless of how many users hit the
site simultaneously, all data files are hosted on sophisticated cloud-
based technology.