LABSWe're working diligently to review the top submissions to our recent competition, and are excited to start writing out huge, novelty-sized normal, regular-sized checks to our intrepid winners. (Stay tuned for more on that!)
In the meantime, a pretty awesome article in Boston's tech press yesterday covered the successful competion of the ERS "Box-Plots for Education" challenge.
We may be biased, but there are some fantastic quotations in there. Here's one about the inspiring geographic diversity of winners:
"The results were very good," Lipstein said, noting that, among the winning entries, participants from the U.S., Russia, Germany and Brazil were represented. "One cool aspect, which I didn't really foresee, is that data scientists from around the world came together to help solve this problem for a Boston-based nonprofit and for education."
Here a couple blurbs from our main man Dan over at ERS:
"Given the amount of time we invest in this process for so many of our projects, DrivenData's solutions seemed like an amazing return on our investment," said ERS Associate Dan Turcza, in response to why the team decided to take the chance on an unproven concept being built out of the Harvard Innovation Lab.
As a non-data-science expert, you don't have a very good intuitive sense of how predictable your data is," Turcza said. "My worst fear around the DrivenData work was that even the smartest models composed by experts would only get half of the answers right. So we're thrilled to have done so well, and want to thank our competitors for that.
And here's where the article quotes #1 finisher quocnle directly from our sparkly, new user forum:
I really wanted to thank [DrivenData] and ERS for hosting/sponsoring the competition. It is great to have this channel for practicing our craft while doing social good. Looking forward to future competitions.
Great stuff. To our existing DrivenData community: thanks for being awesome and stay tuned for more news soon — we have big things in the works.
If you're a data scientist who hasn’t signed up yet, you should definitely sign up now so that you'll be notified when our next competition goes live!