October 22, 2020 ANNOUNCING THE 2020 TOPCODER INNOVATION AWARDS FINALISTS

Let’s quickly play 2020 bingo—unprecedented, disruption, new normal, remote work, remote everything. Bingo? Awesome. To get right to the point, things changed this year. Our annual Topcoder Innovation Awards celebrate customers who are doing bold and exciting work on Topcoder’s platform. This year the gala is going virtual, but it won’t dampen our spirits. 

We are excited to announce the 2020 Finalists across six categories—Program of the Year, Power User, Cutting Edge, Public Sector, Wipro Partnership, and Enterprise Resiliency. These companies and individuals are not just weathering the storm of 2020, but thriving and pushing technology forward in uncertain times. We are proud to celebrate these trailblazers and raise a virtual glass to the best and brightest work on Topcoder this year.

“Technology is a bridge across digital divides. It fosters an environment where people work together with all their collective passion, creativity and grit to get big things done: that’s what the Topcoder Innovation Awards are about. Our 2020 nominees embody that spirit.” —Michael P. Morris, Topcoder CEO 

Program of the Year

The best team and program executed at scale between Topcoder and an enterprise customer.

• BT Group, United Kingdom
• Telstra, Australia
• T-Mobile, United States of America
• Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, United States of America
• Zurich Insurance Group, Switzerland

Power User Award

A technology champion and Topcoder advocate that uses the Topcoder Platform to make development better, simpler, faster, etc.

• Naraen Sridharan of Hewlett-Packard, United States of America
• Shweta Desai of T-Mobile, United States of America
• Kendrick Burson of T-Mobile, United States of America
• Greg Tappert of T-Mobile, United States of America
• Michael Vollmer of Wipro, India

Cutting Edge Award

Highlights a company using the Topcoder Platform for the “project of the year,” which is downright cool, edgy, important, and disruptive.

• Intelligent Voices Of Wisdom (IVOW), United States of America

IVOW’s mission is to make AI more inclusive, and better, through cultural storytelling. IVOW and Topcoder launched the Women in History Dataset ideation challenge to collect, organize and make easily usable public data sources of profiles of women throughout history to help bring cultural intelligence to AI.

• Global Financial Services Firm, Switzerland 

A modern, intuitive crowdsourcing tool, the client enabled internal employees to post ideas, tasks and projects, and collaborate on completion. With much success, the client expects to expand it as a Workforce Transformation initiative.

• Leading Pharmaceutical Company, United States of America

For a critical and time-sensitive trial planning initiative, the company utilized the Topcoder Platform and Topcoder Data Science Community to validate a prediction model, operationalize it for use with existing data, and develop bespoke visualizations to support management of the effort, in under 4 weeks.

• World’s Largest Oilfield Services Company, United States of America

The Oilfield services company used Topcoder’s open innovation to develop a complex data science based algorithm for automating fault detection. This enables the company to pivot to providing their Energy customers with geophysics data services offerings.

• Ognomy, United States of America

Topcoder brought the Ognomy Sleep Apnea App, a COVID-forced revelation from Dr. Dan Rifkin, from concept to completion with development of a fully functional telemedicine and treatment application for physicians and patients. 

• Leading Information Technology Firm, United States of America

Market Price Optimization is a Web based tool which helps manage price and product information across a wide gamut of technology products, for our customer’s global sales team. The work modernized the tech stack, while creating an intuitive user experience, leading to higher productivity for their global sales team.

• Woodside Energy, Australia

Woodside’s Point Cloud Differencing Algorithm that finds the difference between two points in cloud data when the file size is huge (40GB or more) needed a revamp as a PAAS. In less than two weeks, Topcoder and Woodside came up with a solution with advanced capabilities, compatibility and scalability. 

Public Sector Award

Innovative Federal organizations making a tangible difference, internally and externally, by using the Topcoder Platform and Community.

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) division partnered with Topcoder to develop a Natural Language Processing Text Classification Algorithm that automatically analyzed occupational injury surveillance data to more quickly, accurately and cost-effectively identify how to prevent work-related injuries.

• United States Department of Energy

The agency’s Scout software assesses building energy efficiency and flexibility impacts on use, emissions and costs. Topcoder continues to build out the Scout web app that ensures Scout’s features and data are accessible to a range of potential users, including energy policymakers, utilities, building designers and researchers.

• NASA AVAIL

Following the 2019 Topcoder Open, the NASA AVAIL team embarked on a massive Search Optimization Project with Topcoder to enhance how users access the extraordinary amount of publicly available content (audio, visual, etc.) associated with NASA.

• United States Bureau of Reclamation

The USBR Stream Flow Project pushed the envelope of forecasting techniques that affect the country, allowing better management of water resources to support vast agricultural, commercial and residential needs.

• University of Chicago

The DARPA Ground Truth project evaluates social science by constructing simulated worlds with hidden casualties. A team of Topcoder data scientists dubbed Social MIND (Machine Inference for Novel Discovery) collected data, assessed structure, prescribed policies and predicted each world’s future in progressive ways that other technologists could not.

Wipro Partnership Award

Honors outstanding people and companies leveraging the power of Topcoder and Wipro to achieve IT innovations.

• Piyush Kumar of Wipro for work in Technology
• Tariq Rana of Wipro for work in Telecommunications (UK) 
• Madhav Boorugu and Ritesh Sehgal  of Wipro for work in Energy
• Raveendra Rayanna of Wipro for work in Banking
• Parmod Mehta and Manish Sood of Wipro for work in Telecommunications (Australia)
• Shadab Hussain of Wipro for Data, Analytics & AI work within the health and pharmaceutical industries
• Srinivasaa HG of Wipro Digital for Collaboration across the EMEA region

Enterprise Resiliency Award

In light of 2020’s many challenges, these global brands used the Topcoder Platform to persevere on unprecedented technology projects and workforce talent strategy solutions.

• Adobe, United States of America
• Nike, United States of America
• Telstra, Australia
• T-Mobile, United States of America
• Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, United States of America

Winners will be announced November 12 at the annual Topcoder Innovation Summit Awards Ceremony. RSVP here.