Google Buys Kaggle, a Data Science Community, to Bolster Cloud Offerings

US tech giant Google has confirmed the acquisition of data science community Kaggle for an undisclosed sum. The confirmation came at the Google's "Cloud Next" conference in San Francisco late on Wednesday.

Founded in 2010, Kaggle is a place to search, analyse public datasets and build machine learning models. More than 800,000 data experts use Kaggle to explore, analyse and understand the latest updates in machine learning and data analytics.

Google in an emailed statement said, "Kaggle is the best place to search and analyze public datasets, build machine learning models and grow your data science expertise."

Emphasising the importance of democratising AI, Fei-Fei Li, Chief Scientist, Google Cloud AI and Machine Learning, said, "We must lower the barriers of entry to artificial intelligence (AI) and make it available to the largest community of developers, users and enterprises, so they can apply it to their own unique needs. With Kaggle joining the Google Cloud team, we can accelerate this mission."

Kaggle and Google Cloud will continue to support machine learning training and deployment services, while offering the community the ability to store and query large datasets.

In a blog post, Kaggle CEO Anthony Goldbloom said, "The Kaggle team will remain together and will continue Kaggle as a distinct brand within Google Cloud. We will continue to grow our competitions and open data platforms, and we will remain open to all data scientists, companies, techniques and technologies. Kaggle Kernels will continue to support a diverse ecosystem of machine learning libraries and packages supported by Google as well as those outside of Google's toolkit."

Written with inputs from IANS