Google acquires Kaggle in boost to Data Science

The biggest player in Artificial Intelligence, Google acquires the largest Data Science Community named Kaggle. The news was confirmed by Google on Tuesday. The acquisition will once again bring an enormous change in the data science community (domain), and this change will lead a great impact on Artificial Intelligence specifics such as, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Data Analysis and other domains where data is utilized to a great extent.

Saying that data will be utilized in such sectors is strange, as data is used everywhere, every day. In your day-to-day life, you too deal with a lot of data and further this data helps you understand your problems, solutions associated with it, you’re planning depends on the data you perceive and observe, organizational skills and many others. Data is increasing day by day, minute by minute and by each second, there is a data generated. Yes! Sounds weird, but it is generated. I, while writing this article have generated data to help share knowledge, news to the people. Somewhere else, more data might be generated related to some other news, knowledge base or some other field.

Data is very important. It gives you information, gives you insights, makes you think and helps you analyse your problems in a much better way, by designing optimized and correct solutions (solutions too are built with the type of data that you have). It is said that the organization having loads of data in today’s time will definitely make them win the race against their competitors. Though this does not hold true every time, because data analysis requires great amount of skills to understand and manipulate the data, in order to make it profitable for the organization.

I have shared some information on data analysis and its rise, I will also share some more information and details on data analysis in future, which will help small and medium enterprise to cope up with the big giants, understand their customers and in turn increase their profits (that is what matters to any business). Right now, my focus will be to make you aware of this acquisition in which Google acquires Kaggle.

We all know about Google. The biggest online search engine. The provider and developer of Android Operating System. Google is one of the biggest organization in order to provide consumer products and services, for personal and professional use and help users use it in an efficient manner. So I won’t be discussing and briefing you’ll about Google, but I would definitely share some information on the community Kaggle.

Kaggle, was founded in the year 2010 with an aim to help data miners and researchers compete with each other, in order to provide the best model (A model is a mathematical model or a statistical model, designed in order to give accurate and reliable results. Data Model is a technical jargon in terms of data analysis). It is a crowdsourcing platform, where each individual can contribute their input and help the data science community grow. They (Kaggle) relies on the fact that  there are countless strategies that can be applied to any predictive modelling task and it is impossible to know at the outset which technique or analyst will be most effective. Kaggle also hosts recruiting competitions in which data scientists compete for a chance to interview at leading data science companies like Facebook, Winton Capital, and Walmart.

As there is active research going on in the field of data science, deep learning and data analysis each day in Google, thus Google thinks to connect with a larger community of data scientists and researchers.

The company made the announcement at its Google Cloud Next conference this morning in San Francisco, while not disclosing the terms of the acquisition. But it’s not all that surprising that Google would want to snap it up. With hundreds of thousands of data scientists on the platform, it would give Google the immediate ability to broaden its reach within the AI community. As it increasingly goes head-to-head with Amazon on the cloud computing front, it’s going to need as much of an edge as it can get.

Kaggle’s team will stay together, and Kaggle will keep operating and running competitions — as a distinct brand under the Google Cloud. With Kaggle, Google is buying one of the largest and most active communities for data scientists and with that, it will get increased mindshare in this community. Another reason Google is interested in Kaggle, perhaps, is its ongoing relationship with the platform. Earlier this month, Google and Kaggle partnered on a $100,000 machine learning competition aimed at classifying YouTube videos.

This competition had some deep integrations with the Google Cloud Platform, showing how major tech operations can harness the open source nature of, essentially, pools of freelancers grouped together for competitive work.


Artificial Intelligence world

Google and Kaggle, together will definitely improve the community for data scientist and interested researchers in this field. Also Buying Kaggle, and its mindshare within the community, will also probably help with recruiting. Google needs to ensure it keeps snapping up the best talent that specializes in deep learning, competing with other companies like Pinterest (which focuses on visual search). Even if this isn’t a more specialized tech acquisition, it means that Google is broadening its focus to explore more perpendicular approaches to ensure its dominance in AI.