Xeek is Relaunching Challenges

Xeek challenges are back! Get all the details on our upcoming batch of data science competitions.

Why We Host Challenges

Xeek represents several different Research and Development (R&D) groups that are trying to tackle hard problems in the energy industry. While these R&D groups are staffed with amazing, bright people, they are all human and have blind spots and limits to their experience. By hosting a Xeek Challenge, these R&D groups get to see alternate paths — including ones they may never have thought of — to solving their complex problems.

But don’t get the wrong idea — it’s not about perfectly clean and tidy solutions. From a Xeek challenge, R&D groups expect to gather an array of good ideas and workflows. This will help them ask better questions, try different directions, and get closer to finding the answers.

What to Expect from the New Challenges

The next set of challenges will be Xeek's most ambitious problem sets yet. Plus, we’ll be offering our biggest prize payouts to date.

Questioning What’s Possible

For these next challenges, we wanted to experiment with the boundaries of what a data science competition could showcase. In the fall, there will be two challenges for which we have no idea if an answer is even possible. It will be up to the ingenuity of the Xeek community to find a way.

Diversifying the Data Science Space

Diversifying our challenge offerings was incredibly important to us. There are lots of problems in the geosciences that don't neatly fall into the traditional rubric: "Predict variable y using this table of data." Geoscience data is diverse (tables, images, 3D, 4D) and covers a range of topics (documents, satellite, finite models), so providing more unique and innovative content is at the forefront of our minds.

Breaking into Energy Transition

Getting to net-zero emissions, while supplying the energy the world needs, is an important focus in the energy industry. More and more companies are trying to find ways to move from fossil-based systems of energy to zero-carbon models. We’re eager to be part of this conversation, so naturally we wanted to host some Xeek challenges focusing on the Energy Transition space.

Our "Future in Charges" Challenge will be released in September and asks participants to write a solver for partial differential equations that describe a 3D space. Why do such a difficult thing? The challenge idea came from research groups that are trying to better model battery behavior to help with the energy transition. The successful results of this challenge can help progress research by both internal and external research groups. Xeek will open-source the winning code for this competition so that anyone can benefit from the brilliance of our community. There’s so much to be done in this space, and we’re better together.

Getting Involved

Join the Email List

The best way (and only way) to find out about upcoming challenges is by joining our email list. The Xeek team will reach out to the community via email when new challenges arrive. Xeek currently has one challenge active, Slick in a Haystack - a Localization Challenge, that you can participate in now, it closes September 16th.  The next challenge will be released on August 15 and focus on the extraction of data from old crossplots.

Required Experience

This next set of challenges will require some experience — medium to advanced proficiency in data science. We'll host several challenges accessible to those who like to tinker with code (look for the upcoming "Identify and Extract Axes Values" Challenge). Further up the skill ladder, there will be some challenges where contestants will need to throw the book at the problems to crack them.

Prizes

Cash prizes will be offered to the winners, and the size of the prize pool will depend on the difficulty of the problem. Prizes will be distributed to first, second, and third places, with some challenges having an honorable mention category for submissions that show a creative solution.

We’re thrilled to have challenges returning, and we can’t wait to watch each one develop in real time. Head to the Xeek website to make sure you don’t miss out.

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