Team Insight Wins!

I'm proud to announce that Team Insight is the official winner of the first ever Digital Reasoning ShipIt Day. The Insight project's goal was to use matrix factorization and tensor factorization algorithms to find relationships, behavior and beliefs that are not explicitly stated in a large body of human data.

Here's the main user story:

We want Synthesys to show relationships we did not know existed. Not just illustrate facts in a corpus.

Think of it like this. If you subscribe to Netflix, they provide you with recommendations for movies and TV shows that they believe you will like. They seem to have a high degree of accuracy. How do they do this?

They use the same algorithms. If Alice like movie X, and Betsy likes movie X, and Charlie likes movie X, then if both Alice and Betsy like movie Y, the algorithms provide a high value for Charlie liking movie Y.

We tried to apply the same kind of outcomes to our product.

The Trophy

Team Insight will be awarded the Totally Awesome Trophy of Awesomeness. We could find nothing tackier or more over-the-top than this, so it won.

The Award

This is the best part. The organizers and senior management all agreed that whoever gets voted as the best project is pretty much guaranteed to be the best idea that should be integrated into our core product. Thus, work on the idea should be allowed to continue.

Therefore, the winning team chose a single person who was the most instrumental to the project as the award recipient. I'm excited to announce that the honor goes to Andrew Trask. Andrew is an Associate Software Engineer here at Digital Reasoning after being an intern for us last summer.

His passion for working on, and implementing, open source software and data science algorithms has made an immediate impact on the company and the core idea for using these algorithms on Synthesys was the initial inspiration for Team Insight.

As the winner of the ShipIt Day award, Andrew has 40 hours over the next quarter to dedicate, however he sees fit, to continue his work during business hours. That's one full week to spend working on something that he is passionate about and will make a significant different in the product that we will ship to customers.

Congratulations Andrew, Team Insight, and, honestly, everyone who participated and made it such a great event.