SALESFORCE DATA SCIENTIST WINS FIRST PLACE

In Marc Benioff’s January interview with Fortune magazine, he said “when I look at the next set of technologies that we have to build in Salesforce, it’s all data-science-based technology.”

In the same interview, he also urged the technology industry to follow Salesforce’s lead in its approach to philanthropy and giving back.

It’s great  to work for a company that puts a super-high priority on things I also care about: data science and giving back. Coincidentally, I also had the opportunity to do both of these things together at DrivenData’s first-of-many “data science competitions to save the world.”

In this competition, data scientists from around the globe came together to help a Boston public school district more efficiently code its financial files using machine learning algorithms.

It was a grueling two months of data analysis, feature engineering, and experimentation with many different machine learning algorithms, but I am happy to share that I won first place in this challenge by creating the best-performing predictive model in the competition.

Best of all, all data scientists in the competition were able to do what we love (predictive modeling) while making a difference in the world.  Can’t really ask for more than that.

Quoc Le is a Senior Data Scientist in the Product Data Science group at Salesforce.com.

Are you interested in doing what you love while making a difference in the world? Salesforce is hiring! Visit http://www.salesforce.com/tech to find your #dreamjob.