| Company | Kaggle |
| Address | 188 King St. San Francisco – USA |
| Founders | Anthony Goldbloom |
| Founded | April 2010 |
| Funding | $ 11 million |
| Employees | 5 |
| Website | www.kaggle.com |
| Rating | 8 bits |
Kaggle makes data science a sport. They allow everyone to set-up competitions that challenges the worlds best researches and statisticians. These bright minds can work together or compete against each other and come up with solutions for big data as per the requirement of the host of a competition.
Kaggle has over 60.000 data scientists worldwide from fields such as statistics, economics, mathematics or computer science.
How does Kaggle work?
- A competition host prepares the description of the project and prepares the data. Kaggle can help the host with setting the frame of the competition as well as anonymizing the data.
- Participants start working on models and, depending on the competition, submissions can be shown immediately on the leader board.
- When the competitions closes, the host pays the winning model the prize money.
Kaggle offers also private competitions with only top data scientists from around the world. The data scientists who want to join private competitions are background checked and sign NDAs with the host of the competition. The prize money and data are only a part of the motivation to join; the scientists use Kaggle also for networking and collaboration.
One of the famous competitions is the hosting of the $ 3 million Heritage Health Prize or the improvement of gesture recognition for Microsoft Kinect. The platform can help companies, governments and researchers from around the world develop predictive models which can solve some of the worlds hardest data problems.
Kaggle can even help if you have a large set of data but no idea what to do with it. It has developed Kaggle Prospect that allows companies to share an extract of their data and ask the community what sort of predictive modelling question should be asked. The community votes on the different ideas and winning ideas are determined from a pool of the highest-voted proposals by a panel of judges, consisting of data scientists from the host organization and the Kaggle data science team.
Prizes run from as little of $ 1.000,- for a simple predictive model to the $ 3 million Heritage Health Prize. Founder and CEO Anthony Goldbloom, hopes that people out of school will want to be data scientists coming out of school instead of hedge fund traders. And with Kaggle this is possible, because due to the leader board the best data scientist are triggered to perform better every time, allowing them to one day earn as much as top sporters.
Kaggle is a great way for small and large companies to tap into the vast amount of knowledge available in the world. It can help companies creating algorithms without having to hire expensive and difficult to find data scientists. It is easy and simple to set-up and if necessary Kaggle or the community can help the host. More and more companies offer a crowdsourcing solution and now Kaggle has brought crowd-sourcing to big data. Therefore we give them 8 bits.
