Introduction
Give a man a fish – feed him for a day
Teach him how to fish – feed him for a life time!
The person who said it has put in wisdom of a life time in this quote! Further, if there is one field where this fits aptly – it would be programming and data science. You can’t teach coding or data science without asking your students to get their hands dirty!
While we had successfully created a community of data science professionals over the last 2 years focused on learning analytics, we were still not satisfied. While people learnt through our blog, discussion forum and trainings comparison platform, we still had an itch to do lot more. We knew that while this is a good start, there is a lot more which can be done.
I am excited, super excited, hyper excited today to launch our new hackathon platform – DataHack! We will open it up to a small group of people later tonight – those who have registered for our Online Data Hackathon 3.x . There are several reasons why I think you should participate in Online Data Hackathon, if you haven’t already registered. Infact, I can speak about it for hours!
But, I’ll restrict it to a few key reasons in interest of time. Read on!
Participate and compete against more than 500 data scientists across the globe
This is the biggest hackathon we have ever conducted – the competition will be intense and the pressure will be immense. It is bound to have nail biting finish and only the people who give up during the contest don’t win! Every one who finish fighting either win a prize or walk away from the hackathon becoming a better data scientist with this experience.
Where else can you find hundreds of people working on the same problem while sharing their approach and insights?
The experience is unparalleled.
Benchmark yourself against the best brains in the industry (did I mention…on a live problem?)
Our hackathons start from the place where data science capabilities of several organizations stop! This is not a homework in your Stats101 class – this is real stuff. These are problems faced by organizations – be prepared to deal with missing values, outliers, incoherent data – because that is how real life problems are.
But that is not what I want to emphasize here. What gives us a bigger kick is that you get benchmarked against the best brains in the industry. We do all the hard work to bring the best data scientists on this platform, so that you compete against them. You get real time feedback on how your solution fares against that of your peers and these rockstars from across the globe.
This is not it – you also get solutions from people who participated including the winner. What were various hypothesis people were working on? What gave them the lift which you did not get? How can you improve your model? What would they do, if they had some more time? All of this gets discussed on our discussion portal. Don’t believe it – check it out for yourself here
Create a profile and portfolio employers can look at
While you are busy racing against the data scientists across the globe, we build your profile and portfolios so that employers can find you when they want to hire the best resources from the industry. If you are thinking how would the employers know? Don’t worry – we will do it for you. You focus on learning data science and we will sort out the remaining pieces of the puzzle. Here is a little preview into the action – we are already working with more than 50 employers in the industry and helping them hire the best talent.
Does that sound like lot of action? I promise it is! I also promise that this is just the start of bigger things coming your way. To start with, this is just the start of an action packed weekend for more than 500 data scientists across the globe. And if you are sitting on the fence thinking whether to participate or not – jump in right now. There is no looking back from here!
Register Now
The show is about to begin!
Kunal is a post graduate from IIT Bombay in Aerospace Engineering. He has spent more than 10 years in field of Data Science. His work experience ranges from mature markets like UK to a developing market like India. During this period he has lead teams of various sizes and has worked on various tools like SAS, SPSS, Qlikview, R, Python and Matlab.
