POINT AND MATCH: The Hewlett Foundation announced the five winners of its short-answer scoring competition, which asked participants to develop a program to assess over 27,000 answers (average 50 words in length) and arrive at the same scores that human graders would give. The press release bluntly stated that "the results showed that the software is not yet able to achieve the same scores as human graders." But here's an unexpected highlight: first place (and $50k) went to Luis Tandalla of New Orleans, who apparently just picked up data science a year ago when he took Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng's class on Machine Learning (at the time offered through Stanford)! (A win for Luis; a win for MOOCs!) Future data wonks can check out the methodology and code submissions from the five winners.
