FICO, a predictive analytics and decision management software company, and Kaggle, a firm that runs predictive analytics competitions, announced that FICO will host Kaggle competitions in the FICO Analytic Cloud.
The Analytic Cloud is a new web-based infrastructure for creating and deploying analytics-driven applications and services.
FICO and Kaggle will start running analytics competitions later this summer. The competitions will give data scientists, including Kaggle's community of 180,000 members, an opportunity to solve analytic challenges facing organizations in life sciences, financial services, retail, insurance and other industries.
Along with the chance to win cash prizes and recognition, contestants will get free access to the FICO Solution Stack, a platform for analytics and decision management.
"When you challenge a community of data scientists to solve data problems through an objectively judged competitive framework, you get solutions that are fresh, powerful and elegant," said Karthik Sethuraman, head of Analytic Solutions at Kaggle. "By partnering with FICO, we'll be able to present our community members with an even wider array of real-world analytic problems from FICO's diverse client base."
Adds Doug Clare, vice president for cloud analytics at FICO, "Crowdsourced innovation is an extremely exciting outgrowth of what we refer to as the democratization of analytics. Together with Kaggle, we're eager to see what happens when some of the world's greatest minds get their hands on some of the world's most powerful analytic tools and applications in the FICO Analytic Cloud."
Detailed information about upcoming Kaggle competitions featuring the FICO Analytic Cloud will be released this summer.
The FICO Analytic Cloud is built on open-source technologies and uses the latest industry standards, including Apache Hadoop, an open-source software framework; PMML, an XML-based language for predictive modeling; R, an open source analytic programming language and environment; Apache Lucene, a search engine library; and Apache Tika, a content analysis toolkit.
The FICO Analytic Cloud is designed to support data transportability and open modeling best practices, according to the company.
