Introduction
KaggleDays x Z by HP championship is a series of events that are conducted in collaboration with Z by HP as the sponsors with LogicAI and Kaggle as the organizers. 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.
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.
Winner’s Profiles
Winners stand out from the other participants in every meetup and show a strong correlation between the leaderboard standings of the team and their profile tier on Kaggle. Most of the winning teams consist of Masters and Grandmasters. The following chart justifies that on average from all meetups, more than 84.4 % of the participants on the Leaderboard are Masters and Grandmasters who demonstrate exceptional skills in the field of Data Science on a global platform and used their skills in the industry setting in their day to day workflow.
Most of the participants rated that they learn something new from every meetup and use that skills in their profession to get better results at what they do!
Winning Solutions Verification
Every winning team is entitled to winners only when they share their entire work within the 2-hour window after the competition ends. Winners have to submit their entire training and inference code to us which we verify and store with us. Verification is one such crucial part of our evaluation, which assesses that the team has not done any malpractice to gain an unfair advantage over others in the competition. However, the solutions are not only limited to the pre-verification process, they can be used by the partner company to evaluate the profiles of the winners and filter potential data scientists from the top winning teams for recruitment. Winning solutions can reflect a lot about a participant’s profile such as their coding styles, approach, how they prepare pipeline, and much more. This would eventually remove an entire layer of hiring and ease the recruitment process for our partners which includes the assignment and testing process for an interviewee and would eventually test their skills with a 4-hour extensive competition where they rank globally on the leaderboard competing with other great data scientists.
Engagement in Meetups
Every meetup brings with it the open community of data scientists where participants collaborate and get the opportunity to meet other data scientists and discuss various opportunities and breakthroughs. Networking is one core foundation of KaggleDays meetups where not just the participants but also the partner company also get to network and share their products and services through various sources to the data scientists.
Participants join the meeutp on our live ClickMeeting setup which has briefings from the organizers, an ambassador’s live presentation, and a QnA live session. To strengthen the support for Networking, there is a dedicated slack channel for finding teammates, getting updates on the competition, discussing approaches, and taking mentors’ help. Talking about mentors’ support, KaggleDays meetups also provide a dedicated 1:1 Mentoring booth managed by top Masters and Grandmasters at LogicAI.
This is not just limited to Networking for Participants, our partners get exclusive access to present live presentations demonstrating their products with the data scientists and a dedicated live product booth for their representatives to meet participants on a 1:1 basis to discuss custom requirements with the data scientists and future collaboration opportunities such as ambassadorship.
This entire setup has worked wonders in the current meetups and helped a lot of participants learn new skills and at the same time opened up opportunities for Z by HP to hire strong candidates for their specific high-end requirements.
From the above pie chart based on discussion engagement, it is quite understood that 81.2% of the participants have rated us 4 or 5(on a scale of 5) for the discussion and networking that they have been indulged in during the meetup which helped them in technical support as well as upscale their professional careers as they get to collaborate and learn new skills!
Effect on real-world projects
KaggleDays competitions are not just 4-hour timed competitions, they leave an everlasting impression on the participants. They learn new skills from fellow Data Scientists and new techniques from the discussion and slack channels which directly impacts their professional growth as data scientists and opens up exploration for research projects for students. Each meetup brings a problem statement that has a target to solve a real-world problem which is not only exciting to solve in a limited time but opens up the stage for further research and curiosity for participants to explore them further even after the competition ends.
The following chart shows that on average 85.2% of the participants actually use the skills learned from the championships in their real-world projects, whether it be tech industry projects or students’ working on research projects.
Custom Problem Statements
The best part about framing and planning a problem statement is that we are not limited to ideas and the sky is the limit. At KaggleDays we take suggestions and feedback seriously and if needed, we can set custom problems with our partners to solve specific purposes such as either hiring new talent into a specific domain or corporate social responsibility for promoting research. We love to discuss problems that our partners are interested in and work on solving them as a challenge with our clients in meetups building the collaborative community of data scientists even stronger and at the same time helping the partners get their problems solved by top data scientists around the world.
Speed Competitions
The championship consists of 12 short-timed competitions, each meetup event is followed by a 4-hour shot-timed competition. These competitions not only introduce a technical competitive element to the championship but also help participants to develop skills like time management and leadership skills.
Speed programming and quick decision-making are some other skills that the participants learn from these competitions.
Real-time interaction and mentorship
Meetups are packed with 2 very useful 1:1 interaction booths: Mentoring Booth and the Z by HP Product Booth. The Mentoring booth hosts some experienced Grandmasters and Masters who are available live during the entire event for participants to interact on a 1:1 basis. Participants can get their doubts solved regarding anything related to the meetup or if they are looking for any data science guidance in general. This mentoring booth turns out to be a very useful tool for someone who is looking for mentorship during the meetup.
Winners’ Invitations
The top 3 winners from every meetup get the chance to win exciting goodies and an invitation to the final event in Barcelona. Our partners get the chance to meet the winners in person in the finals which can help them to discuss and understand the profiles of the best data scientists and ease their recruitment process.
Level of difficulty
We know that the difficulty of our competitions is an important factor in determining the proficiency of the participants who attend our events. KaggleDays events are neither too easy for beginners nor too hard that no one can solve them. They are just as hard as a proficient Grandmaster would have to put on efforts to maintain a position on the leaderboard and at the same time a beginner does not feel alienated and can make some decent submissions on the Leaderboard. This balance makes our competition one of the best sources for hiring great Data Scientists.
Participants Thoughts!
Our client’s feedback means a lot to us. Based on the feedback we receive we always keep thriving towards getting better at what we do. Here are a few comments from the feedback that we received from our participants at the end of every meetup.
“Really liked the structure of the event and the speaker’s talk. -Ritwik”
“I have been a huge fan of Ken and have been following for the past 13-14 months. His resources have helped me get through a lot of academic difficulties. The competition was just the right mix of fun and excitement! –Aman“
