Topcoder: История краудсорсинговой платформы и сообщества разработчиков

Topcoder (formerly TopCoder) is a crowdsourcing company with an open global community of designers, developers, data scientists, and competitive programmers. Topcoder pays community members for their work on the projects and sells community services to corporate, mid size, and small business clients. Topcoder also organizes the annual Topcoder Open tournament and a series of smaller regional events.

Topcoder was founded in 2001 by Jack Hughes, chairman and Founder of the Tallan company. From 2006 onwards, Topcoder held design competitions, thus offering design services to their clients. In an attempt to optimize expenses, Topcoder introduced new competition tracks in 2007 2008 and delegated more work from its employees to the community. By 2009, the size of Topcoder's staff had been reduced to 16 project managers servicing 35 clients, while the community did most of the actual work via crowdsourcing. Topcoder representatives claim that at this point their community had about 170k registered members, and the company's annual revenue was approximately $19 million. In 2013, Topcoder was acquired by Appirio, and the Topcoder community (of around 500 thousand at the time), was merged, under the Topcoder brand, with the 75k member crowdsourcing community Cloudspokes, created and managed by Appirio. In 2016, Topcoder, along with Appirio, was acquired by Wipro as a part of a $500 million deal and continued to operate as a separate company under its brand. Since the end of 2017, Topcoder has continued to offer its enterprise clients the Hybrid Crowd platform, as a way to protect intellectual property in crowdsourcing projects. In addition to the public Topcoder community, the Hybrid Crowd platform allows for the creation of certified and private crowdsourcing communities. Its certified communities include members of public Topcoder communities who are vetted for a customer's specific requirements, such as signing an additional NDA, completing a background check, or meeting any other particular certifications. The private communities may include an enterprise's employees and contractors. As the first user of Hybrid Crowd, Wipro integrated its internal (employee only) crowdsourcing platform TopGear with Topcoder.

The Competitive Programming track of Topcoder community rotates around Single Round Matches (SRMs) – timed 1.5 hour competitions in which all participants compete online trying to solve the same set of problems as fast as possible. These were the first type of challenges at Topcoder.

It was reported in 2008 that Eli Lilly and Co. would use Topcoder platform to crowdsource development of IT applications for its global drug discovery operations.

In 2013, it was reported that researchers from Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School, and London Business School successfully used Topcoder Community to solve complex biological problems. Researchers say that Topcoder competitors approached the biology related big data challenge, and managed to create a more accurate and 1000 times faster alternative of BLAST algorithm.

Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity organization collaborates with Topcoder to create innovative algorithms for intelligence applications. From July 2017 to February 2018 it ran the Functional Map of the World challenge to develop deep learning algorithms capable of scanning and identifying in satellite imagery different classes of objects, such as airports, schools, oil wells, shipyards, or ports In the ongoing Mercury challenge it aims to create AI methods for automated prediction of critical events, involving military action, non violent civil unrest, and infectious diseases in Middle East.

Since 2016 IBM has been collaborating with Topcoder to promote their cloud platform, IBM Cloud, and IBM Watson services, in particular. Within this partnership, Topcoder has created a dedicated Cognitive sub community and run numerous educational and customer oriented challenges.

In 2010, NASA asked the Topcoder community to optimize the contents of medical kits for future human space exploration missions. In 2013, NASA Tournament Lab cooperated with Topcoder to run data science challenges targeting to improve computer vision algorithms for their Robonaut 2 humanoid robot; in another challenge, Topcoder members were asked to develop algorithms for optimization of ISS solar arrays usage. Also in 2013 Topcoder helped NASA to develop a software solution for tracking food consumption by astronauts. In another challenge, Topcoder community helped NASA and National Geographic's explorer Albert Lin to develop an algorithm to identify human built structures in Genghis Khan's homeland. In 2014, Asteroid Data Hunter, Asteroid Tracker, and many other challenges were carried on to develop better algorithms for asteroids detection in space images. In 2015, the Topcoder Data Science community was challenged by NASA, Quakefinder, Harvard Crowd Innovation Lab, and Amazon Web Services, to come up with an algorithm that finds correlations between ultra low frequency electromagnetic signals emanating from the earth, and subsequent moderate and large earthquakes. In 2017, NASA, HeroX, and Topcoder announced a challenge to optimize their computational intensive software solution for fluid dynamics, FUN3D, which was cancelled later due to a high number of applicants (more than 1,800) during the registration, coupled with concerns about control over the public distribution of the software to optimize. In 2018, a data science challenge is running currently to develop better algorithms for tracking of RFID tagged items within the International Space Station.

At the end of 2017 Topcoder, together with Operation Code non profit charity, announced the launch of Topcoder Veterans Community, that will focus on helping US military veterans to make their way into tech careers in software development via education programs and paid crowdsourcing challenges.