Student Competitions

Udacity Partners with Didi Chuxing for $100,000 Machine Learning Competition

The companies will work together on innovations that will affect hundreds of millions of ride-sharing service users.

• By Sri Ravipati
• 05/19/16

Udacity has announced a partnership with a ride-sharing service in China to host a $100,000 prize competition to find the best machine learning strategy to improve customer experience.

Udacity, which offers the Machine Learning Engineer nanodegree program, has teamed up with Didi Chuxing to host the Di-Tech Algorithm Competition. Didi processes more than 11 million trips, 9 billion routes and 50 TB of data per day using machine learning strategies. As the company grows, so does the need to improve on core algorithms that impact supply-demand forecasting for hundreds of millions of users around the world.

“The competition is a challenge to machine learning and big data students around the world to improve how the company ensures riders always get a car when and where they need it, and drivers know where to be even before a ride is hailed,” according to Udacity.

Didi published the competition data set online and the first round of submissions are due June 17. A group of educators, researchers and data scientists will select and invite the top 10 teams to Didi in July to compete for the $100,000 grand prize. Second and third place will receive ¥50,000 (about $7,600) and ¥20,000 (about $3,000), respectively.

To enter the competition, visit the DiDi Research site.