New data analysis competitions
The Mars Express Power Challenge focuses on the difficult problem of predicting the thermal power consumption. Three full Martian years of Mars Express telemetry are made available and you are challenged to predict the thermal subsystem power consumption on the following Martian year. If successful, the winning method will be a new tool helping the Mars Express Orbiter deliver science data for a longer period of time.
[...]
No, there is no money for the winner, "only" the chance to improve the operations of the Mars Express spacecraft -> thus extending its life -> thus increasing the scientific data that this amazing mission is producing -> thus advancing humankind's knowledge. If this is not enough for you ........
How-to
Privacy
- Not directly related with the data analysis world, but please don't miss this conversation between Edward Snowden, Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald.
Tech
-
How Reddit ranking algorithms work, How Hacker News ranking algorithm works.
-
Netflix’s Grand, Daring, Maybe Crazy Plan to Conquer the World. A very good review of what Netflix is up to these days. It focuses a lot on technical issues, but several paragraphs go deep into how they use data analysis daily:
The instant Daredevil premiered, Netflix greeted its users with eight header image variations of Matt Murdoch and friends, shown to customers in eight identically sized chunks. Netflix immediately began tracking which top shots inspired the most streaming. By now, those eight images will have given way to the best-performing two or three. After 35 days, one of those will become the default. The rest will vanish. This happens now for every Netflix original show. It’s survival of the clickest, all around the world.
-
Feather: A Fast On-Disk Format for Data Frames for R and Python. Here's a Hacker News discussion on this topic.
Two hedge fund “quants” have come up with an algorithm that diagnoses heart disease from MRI images, beating nearly 1,000 other teams in one of the most ambitious competitions in artificial intelligence.
Tencia Lee, who recently left Los Angeles-based Crabel Capital Management to join a robotics start-up, said she and partner Qi Liu, a former employee of hedge fund Two Sigma, had not previously worked before with the winning technology, called deep learning.
Ms Lee and Mr Qi entered the contest in December and created a method that has proved, in early tests, to be as effective as a cardiologist in analysing images of the heart.
“People have been working on this for 15 years — I’m amazed what kind of results came out of this competition in three months,” said Andrew Arai, chief of advanced cardiovascular imaging at the National Institutes of Health.