
$50k competition to spot icebergs off the coast of Newfoundland - kirillzubovsky
http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/ship-iceberg-competition-kaggle-1.4405021
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toomuchtodo
All ships over a certain gross tonnage or in commercial service must use AIS
to announce themselves. Seems straightforward to subtract the satellite image
objects that correlate to ships announcing themselves, leaving only icebergs
(making it cheap to submit follow up satellite image tasking requests at high
resolution to confirm).

Cool crowdsourced challenge!

Edit: Removed US Coast Guard reference, see peeters link below.

[https://www.marinetraffic.com/](https://www.marinetraffic.com/)

~~~
peeters
Not sure why US requirements are relevant to Newfoundland. Here are the
Canadian requirements:

[http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/SOR-2005-134/...](http://laws-
lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/SOR-2005-134/page-5.html#h-41)

Automatic Identification Systems (AISs) 65

(2) Every ship, _other than a fishing vessel_ , of 300 tons or more that is
engaged on an international voyage shall be fitted with an AIS.

(3) Every ship, _other than a fishing vessel_ , of 500 tons or more that is
not engaged on an international voyage shall be fitted with an AIS, but if it
was constructed before July 1, 2002 it need not be so fitted until July 1,
2008.

I've emphasized the part about fishing vessels because that is particularly
relevant here. The waters around Newfoundland are huge fishing grounds.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Indeed, I should’ve grabbed the Canadian requirements. Mea culpa, I sail out
of the US.

AIS has been slowly rolling out for almost 13 years now, and is pervasive
enough that you can be fairly confident most, of not all, large ships are
announcing themselves with it. I know several blue water cruisers even with
sailboats in the 30-50ft range that have it installed to prevent “death by
cargo ship” in the middle of the night.

------
BucketSort
While the Kaggle competitions are cool for students, 50K would be a measly
amount paid to an R&D company or contractor to do such a job. I don't like the
bounty approach to data science the same way I don't like it for software
engineering.

~~~
autokad
as far as i know, most kagglers are not students, but honestly i havent seen
any data on that.

I'll speak for myself, I do it because I love trying to solve interesting
problems and I love data science.

thus far every competition I joined I learned something new and expanded my ds
code base. I also really love the fact people post kernels and discussions I
can learn from as well.

~~~
joshvm
It's very difficult to win a Kaggle comp these days, not because of technical
difficulties, but because you're up against teams of people with the resources
to try a lot more hyperparameters than you. To a certain extent you can win
with money - if you can afford to spend money on a bunch of AWS instances,
that gives you more iteration time than one person with a 1080 in their
bedroom. (So no, they're mostly not students.)

On the other hand the problem sets are 'real' and it's excellent machine
learning experience - importanly because you have the competition element, you
get an idea about how good your solution actually is.

~~~
autokad
in the zillow one, I was 41/3800, but I got over-obsessed with lb results and
the first round of home sales my rank droped to 118.

however, this was my first real kaggle competition, and I only spent a few
weeks on it, (I'd say about 3 total). it was also one of the more competitive
competitions, with a million dollars on the line.

Its exponentially difficult to move up the ranks, but I do think its realistic
to win one (though hard - as it should be). a lot of time, effort, and skills
required but not impossibly difficult.

I think kaggle would do everyone a favor if they gave out awards to more
people, instead of the winner take all mentality. at the very least, everyone
in the top 10 should win money, not just the top 3, with 1 getting the lions
share.

