In addition to the official Kinect Accelerator program we wrote about last month, data crowdsourcing contest site Kaggle today announced a new challenge around Kinect as well.
Kaggle hosts cash prize competitions for people to play with data and come up with various solutions. The contests are calls for hacks that jailbreak fundamental models professionals currently use to monitor finances, write code to analyze shopping behavior, improve space exploration, and a wide variety of other topics.
Their latest is the Gesture Recognition Challenge. It is organized by CHALEARN and is sponsored in part by Microsoft. The object of this contest is to produce an improved gesture algorithm that will analyze a series of Kinect video streams. Samples of actual Kinect video clips are supplied, similar to other Kaggle contests that are used to develop other algorithms.
The winning team of data scientists will take home $10,000. Along with several others, they will have an opportunity for Microsoft to license the winning solutions from a pool of $200,000 for this purpose. The contest starts today and ends April 10.
Judges are done algorithmically, like other Kaggle contests, by calculating and comparing the actual and predicted outcomes. You don’t need to use any particular tool to enter, either.
Unlike most Kaggle contests, with this one the potential entrants are working towards improving a device that is used by millions of people, but in a different context. The idea is to push the boundaries and see how well new algorithms can be built to identify more subtle gestures.
Many of the popular Kaggle competitions have 800 entries, according to the company.
