An Illumination Works employee was the 1st in Ohio and only the 18th in the world to successfully complete the Cloudera Big Data Challenge to date. This employee was part of the Illumination Works – Enterprise Data Services Practice, which is a team of regional data centric experts focusing on BI, Data Warehousing, and Big Data Solutions for Fortune 500 companies. Completed the Fall 2014 challenge and was just formally notified that they are now a Cloudera Certified Professional: Data Scientist (CCP: DS).

This Big Data Challenge included problems dealing with online travel services, digital advertising, and social networks.  The solution to this challenge included the use of modern tools such as Hadoop, Python, Spark and Hive.

The Data Science Challenge” is a bi-quarterly project that is based on real-world data science problems and involves a very large data set. The challenge is open to candidates for a three month time period, and contains problems dealing with a variety of different data sets. Candidates compete against each other and against a benchmark set by a committee which includes some of the world’s elite data scientists. Those who pass the challenge receive their CCP: Data Scientist Credential.