bitgrit Inc.’s Forex Algorithm Challenge – an online competition that asked data scientists from around the world to submit AI solutions for a foreign exchange position system – recently came to a close on December 31 with a total of 2,255 participants and 2,387 submissions. Many of these participants were students at Indian universities, especially Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) campuses.
This AI competition was sponsored by one of Japan’s top three telecom firms as part of their research and development efforts, and the winners in first, second, and third places will receive prizes from a $10,000 USD prize pool. This competition was hosted on bitgrit’s online platform, which recently launched in August last year.
Participants were from all corners of the globe, and included both experienced data scientists and newcomers looking to break into the competitive industry. As for how bitgrit reached over 2,000 participants and submissions for this contest, the key was hosting local events such as hackathons, Meetups, and workshops. Their campus ambassador program was also essential to building relationships and partnering with organizations around the world. One of bitgrit’s missions is to unite academia and industry in the data science field, and this AI competition proved to be an ideal platform to do so.
One of the biggest events focused on bitgrit’s Forex Algorithm Challenge was hosted in partnership with Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) for their 2019 Inter IIT Tech Meet, an annual event bringing the brightest minds in IITs together to discuss and compete on tech-centered prompts.
bitgrit hosted a Data Science Challenge as part of the Inter IIT Tech Meet, for which the first round was the Forex Algorithm Challenge. 220 students participated in 65 teams and contributed their unique solutions to the forex challenge, which included several top submissions overall.
At this event, several IIT student shared the opinion that the Data Science Challenge would help them not only better understand their subject of study using real datasets from competitive fields of business, but that the experience was something they could add to their job resumes and help them find promising career opportunities in the future.
Another one of the Indian universities that bitgrit partnered with was VIT Vellore, one of the top ranked technical institutes in India. In a joint effort, the two organizations hosted an event called HackOff 2.0, which started on December 14 and saw over 350 technical studies students participate.
The event had two parts, the first being a 24-hour hackathon and the second being workshops focused on a variety of topics including data science and blockchain. The forex challenge was the main focus for the hackathon, and it saw an even greater jump in strong submissions thanks to this event.
Regarding the forex challenge, director of bitgrit Ashish Malhotra said, “We are delighted to have reached this significant milestone, and will continue to pour our efforts into our competition platform to better serve our AI engineer and data scientist users.” He continued, “We have exciting plans in the future to implement advanced technologies like blockchain into the platform to better serve the data science community, promote collaboration, and make AI more accessible, which will lead to achieving our goal of democratizing AI.”
The current economic conditions are also ideal for bitgrit to step in and provide these real-world datasets and competitions where students can participate. According to a 2020 Emerging Jobs Report by Linkedin, AI Specialists and Data Scientists boast careers with some of the highest growth potential, taking the first and third positions on the list respectively.
However, while the demand for human resources in these important fields is ever-growing, hiring remains a challenge due to the high geographical concentration of technical jobs and the difficulty of judging high-level data skills. This AI competition shows the viability of bitgrit’s model to connect top talent not just in Silicon Valley, but around the world to companies that require data solutions.
And bitgrit’s competitions don’t only congregate some of the best minds in data science in the world, but also drive data scientists to put forth their best work. By making the platform based on competitions, data scientists are motivated by their peers and the immediate feedback on their submissions to develop their best algorithms and achieve success. The $10,000 prize pool also provides a windfall to anyone who contributes one of the top three submissions.
And the benefits don’t end at the data scientists who participate – companies also benefit from receiving better AI solutions due to the competitive structure of the platform. Even bitgrit itself has gained an edge thanks to this model – through the Forex Algorithm Challenge, the startup was able to gain an edge over their biggest domestic competitor in the number of submissions for a single competition, even though that competitor has been running AI competitions for over six years.
The success story of bitgrit’s forex challenge is one constructed of many parts, but the most significant was its dedication to local events. And bitgrit hasn’t stopped hosting events in India with the close of this competition, either – they recently hosted a workshop at NIT Jalandhar on January 12, and there’s more on the horizon.
About the Author
Kelly Martin is a Marketing Manager at a Japanese IT startup called bitgrit. Born and raised in California, she moved to Japan seven years ago after graduating from UC Berkeley in 2011. She is currently based in the concrete jungle that is Tokyo where she promotes democratic AI provided by bitgrit’s competition platform.
