Kontagent Big Data Challenge winner Paul Butler

We are very pleased to announce the winner of the Kontagent Big Data Challenge. Congratulations to Paul Butler, from Toronto, Canada. Paul will receive the $10,000 grand prize!!

The challenge required participants to use data from the Toronto Open Data Initiative, and derive any interesting insights and analysis from it. Participants then had to create visually stimulating representation of their findings. More than 300 people participated in the challenge, representing 36 countries.

In his submission, Paul created an interactive visualization for any public transit user to explore the city of Toronto from a certain point and time or try to figure out the quickest way to get from Point A to Point B. The visualization shows traffic patterns for subways, streetcars and buses.

Paul created an HTML5 canvas application that draws all possible transit paths, starting from a given point and time. In the interactive visualization, you can adjust the origin stop and start times, speeds and views. You can also hover over stops to see when the transit visited them.

The code he used consists of a python tool that extracts data from a GTFS file (transit data) into JSON objects, and a CoffeeScript / HTML5 Canvas visualization of the data. The makefile included builds the client. Requirements for the build included:

• Python
• Python pypi packages: rtree, joblib
• node.js
• node.js npm packages: browserify, coffee-script

View Paul’s work here: http://ttcvis.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
Note: The interactive visualization works in Chrome.

Screenshot of Paul Butler’s Big Data Challenge submission

Want to join Kontagent?
We announced the winner at our Kontagent Konnect Toronto event last night. In case you haven’t heard, Kontagent is expanding our office up north. (Cool, eh?) If you’re an engineer or data scientist in the Toronto area, we want to hear from you! Don’t live there? We have openings in our San Francisco HQ and offices worldwide, too. Check out our openings!

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About the author: Safia Abbasi is a marketing associate at Kontagent. In her role, she is responsible for project management, marketing automation, and media buying. Previously, Safia studied international business and marketing at the University of Southern California. You can contact Safia at @safiaabbasi.