Whether it’s collecting it, storing it, analyzing it, or simply trying to make sense of it, almost every organization faces challenges with data. And that’s especially true for an organization like the NCAA®, with more than 80 years of data on everything from student-athlete performances to March Madness® tournament results.
Last year we teams up with the NCAA to help them bring together their wealth of historical data to better support students and schools, as well as delight fans. During the March Madness 2018 tournament, we used data analysis on Google Cloud to help us better understand the game and create it funny predictions about what might happen. We turned these real-time predictions into TV commercials during the Final Four – and we we weren’t far from the mark!
As part of this year’s March Madness tournament, we’re expanding our NCAA campaign to developers around the world with training that allows anyone interested in basketball and data analytics to dive in. More and more developers want to use Google Cloud, and we’re ready to meet that demand. (In fact, a recent Indeed study found that Google Cloud skills are the fastest in demand cloud skills.)
We published a new series from Qwiklabs training to teach you how to use BigQuery to analyze NCAA basketball data with SQL and create a machine learning model to make your own predictions. During Google Cloud Next, April 9-11 (right after the Final Four), we will host two bootcamps (Sunday And Monday) that use NCAA data to show you how to create a data science environment spanning ingest, exploration, training, evaluation, deployment, and prediction. We are co-organizing a predictive modeling competition with Kaggle which allows data scientists to showcase their talents (and compete to win $10,000!). And we published a technical blog post and a white paper to give you a deeper look under the hood.
We are also demonstrating the accessibility and ease of use of our platform by recruiting 30 students from across the country to expand our star prediction team. Using the same Google Cloud services that any organization would use to perform large-scale data analysis, our team of student developers will provide data-driven predictions and insights throughout the tournament. You can see all this in action at g.co/marchmadness– plus links to all our training, certifications, resources and more.
Although our campaign is about college basketball, the NCAA’s challenge to gain insights from data reflects the same type of data challenges most businesses face, and many struggle to find the right skilled workforce to help them. We hope this campaign will show how simple and accessible Google Cloud can be for developers around the world. And we hope that by providing a fun and engaging way to learn our data platform, we can train millions of new Google Cloud developers and help organizations around the world.
To learn more about analytics on Google Cloud, visit our website.
