CareerVillage.org looks to the Kaggle community for the expertise needed to match questions to volunteers efficiently with the Data Science for Good competition.
Palo Alto, CA — Kaggle, the data science crowdsourcing community, and Google subsidiary are sponsoring a competition to help the nonprofit CareerVillage.org use AI to efficiently match students to the perfect career advisors.
CareerVillage.org fills a critical gap. The average high schooler gets less than 10 minutes per year with a guidance counselor, leaving students in the dark when it comes to figuring out college, career, and beyond. CareerVillage.org’s online community of over 28,000 Professionals provide personalized career advice to online learners. Now with the help of artificial intelligence and the data scientists in the Kaggle community, low-income students will receive faster, more relevant answers to their career questions.
Through this initiative, Kagglers from around the world will compete to create the perfect algorithm to combine career questions from underserved youth to the ideal volunteer at CareerVillage.org.
Chris Crawford, a Data Scientist with Kaggle, says, “With the Data Science for Good initiative, hundreds of the best data scientists have used their skills to help solve some of the world’s biggest social and environmental problems. In partnership with innovative organizations like CareerVillage.org, we see the power of using data science for good in action.”
Kaggle is posting $15,000 in cash awards to the five winning authors who provide public “kernels,” scripts or short snippets of code, that most effectively tackle the objective. These kernels must be submitted by the deadline of Tuesday, April 23, 2019, for consideration.
Although the current system maintains an answer rate of over 96 percent, CareerVillage.org aims to make its platform faster, more scalable, and more effective at matching the professionals with the most relevant student questions
“With over 3.5 million online learners served, our growth is synonymous with the expansion of volunteers that have signed up to support CareerVillage.org,” says Jared Chung, Founder and Executive Director of CareerVillage.org. “This move is in anticipation of when we’ll have ten times more volunteers. The key is to deliver the right matches at the right time. AI makes that possible.”
About CareerVIllage.org
CareerVillage.org’s mission is to democratize access to career information and advice for underserved youth. We do this by crowdsourcing personalized career advice to students. Our open-access platform matches student questions to our volunteer corps of over 28,000 professionals, enabling our community of 3.5 million young people to access new information and plan their career path.
About Kaggle
Kaggle provides cutting-edge data science, faster and better than most people ever thought possible. They have a proven track record of solving real-world problems across a diverse array of industries including pharmaceuticals, financial services, energy, information technology, and retail. Kaggle offers public and private data science competitions and on-demand consulting by an elite global talent pool.
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Press Release
For Immediate Release
February 25, 2019
Contact: Jordan T. Rivera (jordan@careervillage.org)