Competitions: Beyond the Kaggle Leaderboard - Tatiana Gabruseva

In this talk, Tatiana, Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn, shares her journey from academic physics to becoming a Kaggle Master and winning the Sound Demixing Challenge. We explore how to use machine learning competitions as a strategic tool to build a high-impact career and bridge the gap between theory and production. You’ll learn about: Turning competition code into professional GitHub repos. Converting results into papers for NIPS and CVPR. How LLMs are changing the benchmark for AI competitions. Why hands-on implementation beats passive learning. Using Topcoder and AI Crowd for research-driven goals. Practical steps for your very first model submission. Links: Rise: 3 Practical Steps for Advancing Your Career, Standing Out as a Leader, and Liking Your Life. By Patty Azzarello https://www.porchlightbooks.com/pages... - awesome book about why doing good is not enough, and what else you need to do to promote your career (same applies to competitions) AICrowd - https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges Grand challenges - https://grand-challenge.org/challenges/ Kaggle competitions - https://www.kaggle.com/competitions TopCoder challenge SpaceNet 9 - https://www.topcoder.com/challenges/9... (no current active competitions, but they appear) Medium blog post with instruction -   / writing-papers-tech-reports-after-kaggle-c...   Kaggle Solution Write-Up Documentation - https://www.kaggle.com/solution-write... Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineering - https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07095 Machine Learning Engineering Agent via Search and Targeted Refinement - https://arxiv.org/html/2506.15692v2 AI Research Agents for Machine Learning: Search, Exploration, and Generalization in MLE-bench - chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02554 TIMECODES: 00:00 Tatiana’s journey from academia to staff software engineer 06:01 Machine learning applications in physics and signal processing 09:13 Skill development and domain diversification on Kaggle 13:35 Agentic AI benchmarks and automated competition entries 17:43 Deep technical mastery versus leaderboard gamification 23:04 Hands-on implementation and the illusion of learning 26:01 Specialized platforms and fair competition environments 31:35 Academic publications and research from silver medals 35:24 GitHub repositories and engineering portfolio building 39:02 Technical marketing via blog posts and LinkedIn 43:25 Innovative approaches for academic conference submissions 47:21 Research challenges at NIPS and CVPR workshops 52:51 Medical imaging platforms and specialized recommendations 57:46 First submission strategies for beginners 01:00:56 Asynchronous collaboration and competition team dynamics Perfect for data scientists and engineers looking to transition from academia or build a formal portfolio using Kaggle as a career-advancement tool. Connect with Tatiana: Linkedin -   / tatigabru   Connect with DataTalks.Club: Join the community - https://datatalks.club/slack.html Subscribe to our Google calendar to have all our events in your calendar - https://calendar.google.com/calendar/... Check other upcoming events - https://lu.ma/dtc-events GitHub: https://github.com/DataTalksClub LinkedIn -   / datatalks-club   Twitter -   / datatalksclub   Website - https://datatalks.club/ Connect with Alexey Twitter -   / al_grigor   Linkedin -   / agrigorev   Check our free online courses: ML Engineering course - http://mlzoomcamp.com Data Engineering course - https://github.com/DataTalksClub/data... MLOps course - https://github.com/DataTalksClub/mlop... LLM course - https://github.com/DataTalksClub/llm-... Open-source LLM course: https://github.com/DataTalksClub/open... AI Dev Tools course: https://github.com/DataTalksClub/ai-d... 👉🏼 Read about all our courses in one place - https://datatalks.club/blog/guide-to-... 👋🏼 Support/inquiries If you want to support our community, use this link - https://github.com/sponsors/alexeygri... If you’re a company, reach us at [email protected] #kaggle #machinelearning #aiengineering #careeradvancement #datascience #mlcompetitions #aiagents #llms #cvpr #nips #staffengineer #portfoliotracker #github #aieducation #researchtoindustry #medicalimaging #agenticai #technicalhiring #datatalksclub #shippingai