https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/m7qezx/kaggle-data-science-community-rocked-by-pet-adoption-contest-cheating-scandal

Kaggle, an online data science community that regularly hosts machine learning competitions with prizes often in the tens of thousands of dollars, has uncovered a cheating scandal involving a winning team. The Google subsidiary announced on Friday that the winner of a competition involving a pet adoption site had been disqualified from the contest for fraudulently obtaining and obscuring test set data.

The fact that a team cheated in a competition nominally intended to help shelter animals also raises questions about whether the people who participate in machine learning competitions like Kaggle are actually interested in making the world a better place, or whether they simply want to win prize money and climb virtual leaderboards.