COLUMBUS, Ohio, Feb. 14, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — Shaker International invites participation in the second annual Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychologists (SIOP) Machine Learning Competition, now through March 15, 2019. The goal of the competition, built upon open source principles, is to infuse the latest and most powerful methods in computer science, data science, and artificial intelligence (AI) into the field of people analytics.

The competition, designed and engineered by Shaker’s leading researchers in artificial intelligence, Isaac Thompson, Ph.D. and Nick Koenig, Ph.D. partnered with Amazon research scientist Mengqiao (MQ) Liu, Ph.D., breaks new ground for the SIOP community.

“Our aim is to revolutionize the current state of analytics techniques in our field. Tapping into the power of open source principles, we are guided by community, transparency, and innovation,” explained Dr. Thompson. “To promote community, we partnered with computer science students at Georgia Institute of Technology to host the competition on their website, EvalAI. This allowed us to open up the competition to an unlimited number of teams. To ensure a new level of transparency, both the dataset and winners’ codes will be made available to the public after the competition, serving as a benchmark for the field to drive rapid innovation.”

To date over 75 analytics teams have entered the competition. Teams have joined from companies such as Capital One, Facebook, Walmart along with research institutions such as Bowling Green State University, Michigan State University, and Georgia Tech. The competition website maintains a public leaderboard running top team scores. Winners will be chosen based on how well their algorithms perform against a hidden data set. The top four teams will be announced by March 21st and be invited to present their approach and results at the SIOP 34th annual conference held April 4-6, 2019, at the Gaylord Convention Center near Washington, D.C.

“This is how we can create quick innovations in #IOPsych: Make it a contest! This has been happening in computer science hackathons for years with great results. Some of the tech products you use every day started out as contest entries,” tweeted one I-O Ph.D. candidate interested in the contest.

About Shaker International
Leveraging over 15 years of data, selection science, and proven results to help companies improve their quality of hire, Shaker helps companies create recruiting efficiencies, reduce turnover, improve quality of hire, and deliver a better hiring experience.

About SIOP
SIOP is the premier membership organization for those practicing and teaching I-O psychology. While an independent organization with its own governance, SIOP also represents Division 14 of the American Psychological Association and is an organizational affiliate of the Association for Psychological Science.

SOURCE Shaker International