The Championship consists of 12 online meetups held across the globe every 3 to 4 weeks with a final in-person event in Barcelona, Spain.
Introduction
The 3 winning teams from every online meetup will be invited to participate in the in-person final meetup getting a chance to become the ultimate Kaggle Days champion and win Z by HP workstations.
KaggleDays is a community of more than 12 Million Data Scientists from all across the globe with diverse cultures and demographics with access to worldwide reach, accessible from anywhere through the meetups.
Geographies that we have covered, help in growing sales
KaggleDays championship is organized worldwide events which are not only gathering great data scientists around the world but also building a stronger community of 12M data scientists around the world covering wide geographic regions with data scientists from almost all the continents participating in the championship. Meetups are organized every 3-4 weeks at a new location in a different country. Participants which are local to the event location get to attend the meetups in their local timezones.
The event starts at 4:00 PM local timezone and the competition starts at 5:25 PM local timezone. The participants from each timezone will get to experience the event in their comfort of time. A detailed agenda looks like the one shown below where the meetup starts at 4:00 PM with the welcoming introduction, followed by the live presentations from the Kaggle Grandmasters and our partner Z by HP. Then the competition starts at 5:25 PM for a duration of 4 hours where the participants get to work on a problem and build a data science solution where the the best performing submission gets to stand on top of the leaderboard. Winners are invited to the final event which will be held in person in Barcelona, Spain.
Hardware/Software which fascinates participants
Every competition brings with it a mix of uniqueness and excitement that challenges the participants to push their limits. The competitions are quite competitive so participants always have a habit of using the best hardware possible to achieve the best performance of their models. They require a high-end machine and their preferences in the competitions were highly inclined towards using the Z by HP workstations. Z by HP has been demonstrating their hardware products to the participants and we have received very good feedback from the winners who have used this hardware after first getting introduced to them from a meetup that we organized.
Winners use powerful workstations locally
Since the events demand strong hardware and compute power, most of the participants prefer using the cloud by spinning up their own cloud virtual machines for the event. However, after understanding the mindset of winners, they are always inclined towards having a stronger and a powerful machine at their local workspace that not only helps them to execute the tasks much quicker but also gives them the freedom to perform experiments locally without any dependence on the cloud.
Promoting products booth
To support the participants with any kind of information they want to take regarding the hardware, we have a live product booth at every meetup where the participants can have a 1:1 interactive session with the representative from our partner Z by HP. Participants get support for any query they have regarding these products and hardware and can discuss other opportunities such as ambassadorships with the product guides. During an entire event, the product booth remains active and any participant can take advantage of the product booth to discuss their personal hardware requirements and choose what best suits their needs.
Live product demo presentation
After the briefing from the organizers, our partners from Z by HP takes the stage and they demonstrate their live presentation in front of all the participants with their products, services, and their ambassadors who have been using these powerful workstations for a while now and share their thoughts and pro-tips with the participants on how they can utilize the workstations for peak performance and save a lot of time. We also have a live QnA session where the attendees get the opportunity to ask their doubts or request specific information about the product’s use and can further discuss their individual requirements with the support team in the 1:1 products booth.
Ambassadors shares their experiences of using workstations
During the live presentation by the representatives from Z by HP, they discuss opportunities for ambassadorship as well as highlight the experiences of the ambassadors after using their products. Feedback from the ambassadors also helps participants to learn from their experiences of using the hardware such as what libraries or workflows worked best for their day-to-day professional use as well as how the workstations helped them in winning a competition.
Where did the participants hear about the championship?
We conducted a survey to understand the participant interaction pattern on how the participants got to know about the KaggleDays Championship. So we asked them a very simple question.
How did you learn about our events?
Initially, in the first few meetups, participants were introduced to the championship through Kaggle promotions and KaggleDays social media such as newsletters, Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin covering up to almost 83% of registrations. Since it was new, most of the participants used to register for the events through our promotions.
Initial registration’s pie chart
However, as time progressed the participants started to show more interest and we received huge repeated footfalls. We started getting registrations through not just Kaggle promotions with almost 43% of the participants and KaggleDays social media with almost 26% of the participants but also through our website kaggledays.com with almost 15% of participants getting to know about the championship. Since the events get more familiar in the data science community, a lot of previous participants started inviting their friends to team up for the competitions representing around 13% of registrations through word of mouth from friends and colleagues which actually played a great role in the success of each meetup.
Current registrations pattern
Unbounding the hardware limitations in the finale
We completely understand that hardware should never be a bottleneck for performing extensive machine learning and deep learning tasks, so in the final meetup, which will be held in person in Barcelona all the participants would get the chance to use the state-of-the-art hardware setup developed by Z by HP such as the powerful Z8 Workstations powered by state of the art Nvidia RTX GPUs to build their models and train them in the best possible way they can without any hardware limitations.
Participant’s comments on hardware/software setup
KaggleDays championship invites top-notch data scientists from all around the world, we see that the hardware and software requirements for the participants are also demanding as they worked with state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning algorithms even in a short duration time-bound competition. We have received numerous feedback from the participants who were interested in getting to know more about the products and hardware from our partner Z by HP. A lot of participants have attended the 1:1 live product booth to discuss their individual hardware needs and what hardware setup works best for them to win a competition! Participants also showed interest in the Data Science Software Stack provided by Z by HP which comes pre-loaded in the new ZBook mobile workstation and Z8 workstations. Here are a few comments from the participants who enjoyed the competition and talked about the hardware and software benefits of having a strong workstation in a Kaggle competition.
“This is my first time taking part in the KaggleDays event. I think it is a little different from a normal competition, but it was exciting. I wish I had a powerful machine like HP, it would have worked wonders” – Jonny
“It is difficult for me to tackle NLP task in 4hours, but my motivation for competitions raise. The event is very interesting. Having a powerful computer would definitely improve my performance.“ – Nikunj
