Hasta La Creative!

“Keep Calm and Continue Testing.” The Harvard student’s T-shirt tagline seemed to encapsulate the mood in the frigid room filled with data crunchers. It was just another drizzly Saturday in the MIT neighborhood of Kendall Square in Cambridge, Mass., where mostly young men gazed at their laptops, observing predictive models parsing data representing grocery-store purchases of things like DVDs and milk. It was just another hackathon.

But this time it was sponsored by a consumer-data firm hoping to foster innovations in data analysis, and perhaps get a jump on the competition when it comes to harvesting potential data-science employees. More and more companies with lots of data to play with are sponsoring hack events to tap into fresh analytical talent.

“It smells like math in here,” quipped Malcolm Faulds, head of global marketing at Dunnhumby. The 24-year-old consumer-data company was sponsoring the hack, an 11-hour slog pitting small teams of coders against one another in a contest to come up with the most accurate model for predicting the sales success of several grocery items 26 weeks after launch.

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