Spring Race II Data Mining

Time for Spring Race II, a new chance to win another US $1000 prize!

The same terms and conditions apply, so we’ll spare you the how-to-enter-the-race details. What’s even more important than meeting the May 12th, 24:00 deadline is that you submit an original solution, designed and implemented for this competition. This is a mandatory condition to enter the race, so please keep it in mind. And of course, register your team first using this form.

Relevant People Data Mining

LinkedIn is used by millions of professionals in order to find potential business partners, new customers or talents for recruiting. While technically it is easy to search LinkedIn, even humans have trouble identifying the profiles that better match a set of criteria. For example, people with the longest LinkedIn profiles are not necessarily the best matches.

You must create an app that is able to identify and assign a score to the LinkedIn profiles based on input information. This input must be provided by the user, therefore the app must ask as many details as possible about the desired profile in order to find the best match. The app must mine LinkedIn and present a list of potential candidates ordered by a match score.

Enter the Spring Races

The Rules

  1. You can write the app in any programming language you like.
  2. You must accompany your app with some docs. Give us some heads-up, it will support your project.
  3. Do not forget to mention the name of your team in the docs. That way, we can easily relate to your registration info.
  4. Check that your Bitbucket repository is private and that you provide us access to view your project.

Some Advice

While it’s your job to design and implement the app, we have some tips:

  1. LinkedIn might not be enough for scoring. It may be helpful to use other sources of information as well.
  2. You might not be able to use the LinkedIn API due to various limitations.
  3. In order to be efficient, the matching algorithm should not use only the input criteria provided by the user.
  4. You should make some input criteria required (e.g. location) due to the large number of potential results.
  5. Once the race ends, make sure you can be reached at the e-mail/phone numbers you provided in the registration form. We might want to get back to you with questions.

The miner capable to find the best matches will win!

If you have any questions, we’re happy to help. Just let us know using the comments to this article. Good luck and may the 12th be with you! 😉

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