NASA Search Portal - Recommendation Engine Bug Fixes Challenge

Project Overview

NASA needs your help building an enterprise search portal. NASA & Topcoder have completed the design and frontend code for a search interface that is intuitive for beginner to advanced users which allows users to search against NASA intranet as well as public internet data sets.

 

As part of this project, we are integrating the search engine (Solr Cloud) which will serve as a backend to the Enterprise Search User Interface and seek to expand the capabilities of the existing application.

 

Challenge Details

We first started out with an Idea Generation challenge to get ideas and suggestions from the community on using machine learning to create a recommendation engine for our search portal.

This challenge can be found here.

 

We then launched a challenge to implement the ideas and suggestions received from the winning submission of the Idea Generation challenge. This challenge can be found here.

 

While the challenge was quite complex, the winning submission from the above challenge managed to implement the requirements - up to some extent. However, this submission has multiple issues. In its current state, we cannot deploy it to the client facing application and cannot ask the client to review it.

 

We would like you to check out the submission from the previous challenge, go through the issues that we have collected and check out the ideas and suggestions from the Idea Generation challenge. Using this information, we would like you to improve the submission, maintain the high standards of topcoder and showcase a quality submission to our client.

 

We would also like you to improve the Deployment process.

 

Unlike other regular challenges, this challenge requires extensive knowledge of machine learning principles. Other than this, the application uses Nodejs to host the website and Apache Solr as its indexing engine.

 

Submitting a solution that meets topcoders high standards is critical here. Your submission will be showcased to NASA and it is absolutely important for us to put our best foot forward.

 

Resources Provided

1. The winning submission of the Idea Generation challenge

2. The winning submission of the challenge which implemented the suggestions of the IDea Generation challenge

3. The issues with the current submission that we would like you to fix as part of your submission.

Final Submission Guidelines

1. You need to fix all the issues that we have pointed out with the current submission

2. You need to go through the suggestions from the Idea Generation challenge and improve the current submission to implement any missing suggestions.

3. Once you are ready to submit, archive your submission and upload it to the Submit and Review tool for this challenge. You are welcome to submit a git patch of your changes too.

4. Comment your code well. Without this, the reviewers will not be in a position to review your submission and understand the changes that you have carried out.