FICO to Engage Kaggle's Community of 180,000 Data Scientists to Drive Innovation in the FICO Analytic Cloud

SAN JOSE, Calif., July 7, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- FICO (NYSE: FICO), a leading predictive analytics and decision management software company, and Kaggle, the global leader in running predictive analytics competitions, today announced that FICO will host Kaggle competitions in the FICO^® Analytic Cloud, a new web-based infrastructure for creating, customizing and deploying powerful, analytics-driven applications and services.

FICO and Kaggle will begin running analytics competitions later this summer. These competitions will give data scientists, including Kaggle's community of 180,000 members, an opportunity to solve analytic challenges facing organizations in life sciences, financial services, retail, insurance and other industries.  Besides the chance to win cash prizes and professional recognition, all contestants will enjoy free access to the FICO^® Solution Stack, FICO's groundbreaking platform for Big Data analytics and decision management.

"Crowdsourced innovation is an extremely exciting outgrowth of what we refer to as the democratization of analytics," said Doug Clare, vice president for cloud analytics at FICO. "Together with Kaggle, we're eager to see what happens when some of the world's greatest minds get their hands on some of the world's most powerful analytic tools and applications in the FICO Analytic Cloud." 

"When you challenge a community of data scientists to solve data problems through an objectively judged competitive framework, you get solutions that are fresh, powerful and elegant," said Karthik Sethuraman, Head of Analytic Solutions at Kaggle. "By partnering with FICO, we'll be able to present our community members with an even wider array of real-world analytic problems from FICO's diverse client base."

Detailed information about forthcoming Kaggle competitions featuring the FICO Analytic Cloud will be released this summer.

The FICO^® Analytic Cloud is built on open-source technologies, and leverages the latest industry standards, including Apache Hadoop, an open-source software framework; PMML, an XML-based language for predictive modeling; R, an open source analytic programming language and environment; Apache Lucene, a search engine library; and Apache Tika, a content analysis toolkit. The FICO Analytic Cloud is designed to support data transportability and open modeling best practices. For more information about the FICO Analytic Cloud, visit http://www.ficoanalyticcloud.com. 

About FICO
FICO (NYSE: FICO) is a leading analytics software company, helping businesses in 90+ countries make better decisions that drive higher levels of growth, profitability and customer satisfaction. The company's groundbreaking use of Big Data and mathematical algorithms to predict consumer behavior has transformed entire industries. FICO provides analytics software and tools used across multiple industries to manage risk, fight fraud, build more profitable customer relationships, optimize operations and meet strict government regulations. Many of our products reach industry-wide adoption. These include the FICO^® Score, the standard measure of consumer credit risk in the United States. FICO solutions leverage open-source standards and cloud computing to maximize flexibility, speed deployment and reduce costs. The company also helps millions of people manage their personal credit health. FICO: Make every decision count^™. Learn more at www.fico.com.

FICO and "Make every decision count" are trademarks or registered trademarks of Fair Isaac Corporation in the United States and in other countries.

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