In the autumn of 2012 I spent three months interning for a computer science company who
specialise in developing predictive algorithms for commerical companies.
They propose techinical problems such as predicting who will default on loans, or who will claim on their
insurance as competitions where people download historical data, train models and then
upload their solutions to a test set. They crowd source their technical problems and in so
produce state of the art computer programs that can be used in the commerical sector.
In my time I helped set up the astronomy competition 'Observing Dark Worlds', which
required participants to fit models to realistic gravitational lensing data. This competition
was a great way to crowd source the problems of model fitting to those scientists that do it
for a living.
In the future we are looking to start up galaxy classification competitions that will involve
the citizen science website, Galaxy Zoo.
specialise in developing predictive algorithms for commerical companies.
They propose techinical problems such as predicting who will default on loans, or who will claim on their
insurance as competitions where people download historical data, train models and then
upload their solutions to a test set. They crowd source their technical problems and in so
produce state of the art computer programs that can be used in the commerical sector.
In my time I helped set up the astronomy competition 'Observing Dark Worlds', which
required participants to fit models to realistic gravitational lensing data. This competition
was a great way to crowd source the problems of model fitting to those scientists that do it
for a living.
In the future we are looking to start up galaxy classification competitions that will involve
the citizen science website, Galaxy Zoo.