Google and Kagglers Join Forces

Google has been holding events in the past week to highlight and attract more businesses to its cloud service. As representatives from the tech giant spoke on the growing number of companies their service currently hosts; Google made the announcement of its acquisition of Kaggle. Traditionally, Amazon and Microsoft have dominated the cloud space. Google’s recent acquisition Kaggle is in an effort to differentiate their cloud platform while making strides in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

What is Kaggle?

Kaggle was founded in 2010, as what could be colloquially described as an open sourced, series of competitions. In short, Kaggle presents a problem to data scientist, companies and researchers around the globe. The community then competes to present the best solution to that problem. The community, or Kagglers, stand at over 500,000 strong. To date there has been over 200 competitions. These competitions have resulted in contributions to Microsoft and CERN. They are also responsible for advancements in everything from HIV research to traffic predictors.

A Step Further for AI

Google’s acquisition of Kaggle, means Google has essentially teamed up with the 500,000 plus Kagglers. When Google officially announced the acquisition, they too presented new software that immediately created a buzz in the tech world. The company demonstrated Video Intelligence API (application program interface), which is a step forward in machine learning and recognition. This API has the unique ability to automatically identify the content of a video and the type of video. On stage, Google played a short commercial. The API was able to identify the commercial as such and understand the content of the commercial, a task previously accomplished only through manual tagging.

Still, the reality is that Google lags behind the leaders of cloud services, namely Amazon and Microsoft. Though, the numerous keynotes that have been held, in addition to the acquisition of Kaggle proves that Google is trying to make its cloud platform one that is highly competitive all the while continuing to improve artificial intelligence.