by Angela Guess
Quentin Hardy of the New York Times reports, “Companies without enough data scientists, meet lots of analysts willing to take your work. EMC’s Greenplum division, which makes data analytics software, is joining forces with Kaggle, a company that finds and deploys people good at statistical inference, to produce a kind of Big Data engineer marketplace. Customers of a Greenplum product called Chorus will be able to search and examine the profiles of thousands of people worldwide who have participated in Kaggle’s online statistical competitions. The companies can then hire these master statisticians by the hour to solve their data problems.”
He goes on, “Kaggle contests cover things as diverse as finding dark matter in the universe and predicting bond prices. In addition to solving specific problems, they identify the people who are good at the problem solving. Kaggle then runs private data competitions for big companies, hiring its best contestants as contractors. It collects a fee for that. So far, Kaggle has registered 55,000 contestants, any of whom can register to be hired for projects by Greenplum customers. The project with Greenplum was announced on Tuesday, so it is still unclear how many people will want to participate.”
photo credit: Kaggle
