The Application of Contest Theory

Abstract, Video, full text in ACM digital.

Contest Theory   By Milan Vojnović 
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 60 No. 5, Pages 70-80
10.1145/3012008

A variety of Internet online services are designed based on contests. A canonical example is crowdsourcing services, which solicit solutions to tasks by open calls to online communities. Here the tasks can be of different categories, such as art design, software development, data-science problems, and various challenges such as planetary-scale locating of objects.12, 28 These services operate under certain contest rules that include specifying a prize allocation mechanism, for example, awarding only a first-place prize or several position prizes.   ... " 

Automating Big Data Analysis

Automating big-data analysis

With new algorithms, data scientists could accomplish in days what has traditionally taken months.
Larry Hardesty | MIT News Office

Last year, MIT researchers presented a system that automated a crucial step in big-data analysis: the selection of a “feature set,” or aspects of the data that are useful for making predictions. The researchers entered the system in several data science contests, where it outperformed most of the human competitors and took only hours instead of months to perform its analyses.

This week, in a pair of papers at the IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics, the team described an approach to automating most of the rest of the process of big-data analysis — the preparation of the data for analysis and even the specification of problems that the analysis might be able to solve.

The researchers believe that, again, their systems could perform in days tasks that used to take data scientists months.

“The goal of all this is to present the interesting stuff to the data scientists so that they can more quickly address all these new data sets that are coming in,” says Max Kanter MEng ’15, who is first author on last year’s paper and one of this year’s papers. “[Data scientists want to know], ‘Why don’t you show me the top 10 things that I can do the best, and then I’ll dig down into those?’ So [these methods are] shrinking the time between getting a data set and actually producing value out of it.” ...  '

A Closer Look at Crowdsourcing

Crowds are biased.  So what does that mean for crowdsourcing? In HBS Working Knowledge: " ... At the Open and User Innovation Workshop, several hundred researchers discussed their work on innovation contests, user-led product improvements, and the biases of crowds. ... " 

Multiple Government Big Data Initiatives

Information Week on multiple government big data initiatives.  And you can add another, the DARPA xData initiative.    " ... A trio of federal agencies is looking to engage the American public to garner ideas about how to best utilize the massive amounts of data housed on government servers. NASA has joined forces with the Energy Department and the National Science Foundation to launch "The Big Data Challenge" -- a series of four contests, beginning with an "ideation challenge" designed to find new tools and methods for analyzing unique data sets ... " 

Crowdsourcing Site

I was contacted to take a look at a fascinating site that helps you construct crowd sourced solutions.It is called Squad Help.  It looks like it uses contests to help companies solve a soft problem, like naming a product or site.  It names a specific $ reward for a best solution. Examples where the solution does not require any deep expertise. Will examine further and report here.

Food Lion IPhone App

In SupermarketNews: Always innovative Food Lion is promoting its new IPhone App with contests.

Embracing an Innovation

A timely piece in Knowledge@Wharton on choosing innovations. Something we and all enterprises struggled with under the topic of knowledge management and portfolio analysis, Aspects of it can be optimized, but the measures involved are often difficult to accurately obtain and get agreement on. I have seen this done in many different ways, from executive popularity contests to multiple dimension visualizations. The memory of why something was done is often less than objective:

Popularity Contests: Why a Company Embraces One Innovative Idea but Shuns Another

Multinational corporations have a lot of good things going for them. They have built up a rich store of knowledge over the years, allowing their subsidiaries to share ideas and best practices in ways that smaller companies can only dream of. They also exploit their vast global reach and on-the-ground knowledge to sniff out new concepts or products being used by rival companies in other parts of the world. But these processes aren't always as successful as they could be. Felipe Monteiro, a Wharton professor of management whose recent research looks at how and when new knowledge gets the thumbs up within firms, explains why ... ' .

Fun Theory from Volkswagen

Via IFTF: The Fun Theory Site. Some ongoing contests for innovations in this space.

' ... This site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better ... '