$100K Telegram Data Clustering Contest

by Samuel White

Telegram has announced a new competition the task of which is to create a grouping and sorting algorithm for news articles. The prize fund of the first stage is $100,000.

The list of tasks of the first stage is as follows:

  1. Isolate articles in English and Russian
  2. Isolate news articles
  3. Group news articles by category
  4. Group similar news into threads
  5. Sort threads by their relative importance

You can send your works until 11:50 p.m. (Dubai time) of December 2 as a standalone tgnews application with a CLI interface. The authors of the best solutions will be able to take part in the second stage of the contest, getting a chance to claim another $100,000-prize.

We recall that in June, Pavel Durov invited Yandex developers to work on Telegram and told about his idea to create a news aggregator free of political censorship.

We don't know whether any of the IT giant's employees responded to Durov's proposal. Still, the Telegram team probably did not refuse their idea to create "the first effective and free news aggregator in the history of the Internet."