SEE WHAT LIESBENEATH THE SURFACE
ENERGY + TOPCODER DATA SCIENCE & ANALYTICS

LETTER
FROM THECEOEvery company wants to innovate, move faster, boost
safety and evolve their organizations to get incredible
results. The challenge is staffing the right people,
accessing and leveraging emerging technologies, andadding change without disrupting operations. Our
energy customers understand the need for next-generation solutions and experience without sacrificing
quality. That’s why they’ve used Topcoder to getgroundbreaking design, data science, and development
work done with crowdsourcing, a delivery model we’ve
pioneered and honed over nearly twenty years.
Crowdsourcing allows companies to experiment,
scale, and get high - end results from a global talentpool of developers, designers, data scientists, andtesters — all available 24/7, on demand. With the skill,speed, scale, flexibility, and outcome-based pricing
Topcoder provides, energy customers have been able
to roadmap and accomplish more. Together, we canthink bigger, aim higher, and create winning solutions.
The future is here, and we’re thrilled to be with you.

Mike Morris
Topcoder CEO

AN INTRODUCTION TO TOPCODER
AND CROWDSOURCING
ON-DEMAND GLOBAL TALENT AND DIGITAL SOLUTIONS AT SCALE

As technology changes, so do expectations.
But the time and technical expertise to exceed
evolving customer expectations and get tomarket faster can be difficult to find. Topcoder,
the leading crowdsourcing platform, makes it
easy to quickly turn ideas and requirements
into incredible digital solutions — with thehelp of the world’s largest talent network.
Not only do you pay only for results, rather
than hours, but you also get a secure project
management process, a dedicated project
manager, and a team of experts available 24/7.

WHY CREATE SOMETHING GREATWITH TOPCODER?

WHAT CAN YOU GET DONE
WITH TOPCODER?

SEE HIGH-QUALITYRESULTS — FASTDESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

With the ability to run concurrent
workstreams on the same platform,
get design, development, data science,and QA work done in record time.
GET A TEAM FOR THE PRICE OF A
FREELANCER

One-of-a-kind designs and expert codefor your next app or web project.
DATA ANALYTICS AND ALGORITHMS
Do more with your data. Quickly optimize
algorithms and develop predictive models.

Don’t tie your project’s success to one
freelancer’s time and expertise. Get a teamof innovative designers and developers, aswell as end-to-end project management.

QUALITY ASSURANCE AND TESTINGPAY FOR OUTCOMES, NOT HOURS

AI-POWERED SOLUTIONS

No matter how many hours or
iterations it takes to achieve success,you pay only for the result.

Real-world testing and UI/UXsuggestions from incredible testers —plus, best-in-breed QA engineers.

Everything from voice, text, and image
analysis solutions to smart chatbots.
RAPID PROTOTYPING AND MVPS
Turn multiple solution concepts into designs,
prototypes, and MVPs in a matter of days.

ENERGY, NATURALRESOURCES &UTILITIES CASESTUDIESOPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION - MIXED FORMATS

MUD LOG DIGITIZATION
Converting paper records into digital format can bechallenging, particularly when the records have various
types of data, each with their own important meaning.

THE OUTCOMES50+YEARS SAVED IN MUD
LOG PROCESSING

Mud logging, with its varied formats, diversity of graphed
data, as well as hand-written annotations, presents asignificant challenge for digitization efforts. However, a
recent Topcoder customer approached us to assist themwith exactly this challenge because they recognized that thevaluable data contained in mud logs, if digitized, can unlock
new analytical capabilities, speed-up decision-making,and increase confidence in geological interpretations.
The mixed-format of mud log data does not necessarily
lend itself well to fully unassisted, automated approaches. To re-enter all data manually would be cost andtime prohibitive (to say nothing of error prong, or otherissues) so another hybrid approach was needed.
Through a series of competitions in the Topcoder community,
a solution was built that combined human-assisted work,
automated OCR, and machine learning algorithms to extract
structured meaning from mud log records. This included
digitized logging of shows, stains, traces, and negatives at respective drilling depths. By turning to Topcoder, this customer
has saved 50+ years in mud log processing time and added
millions in potential revenue through the value generated.

MACHINE LEARNING - OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATIONAQUIFER BOUNDARYIDENTIFICATION
Cross contamination of water and wellbore fluids in oil wells
is costly and unsafe for both workers and people living near
the contamination sites. However, the process of identifying
aquifer boundaries across hundreds or even thousands ofwells is time-consuming and prone to human error, making it
difficult to perform at scale. Our customer sought a method
to rapidly identify aquifer boundaries in unidentified wells
using algorithmic processing of gamma ray and resistivity
logs measured at a range of depths within the well.
In Topcoder’s long-form competition, known as a Marathon
Match, contestants were provided with a dataset of welllog data from 609 wells and asked to create an algorithm
capable of identifying the depth of aquifer boundaries
for eight different strata in a well at a given location.
With 349 algorithms submissions received, the algorithm
results were compared with actual aquifer boundary locations to select the best-performing solutions. The winning
submission combined 3D-positioning interpolation withrandom forest algorithms to estimate the depths of aquifer
boundaries with an average depth error of less than one
foot and false positive and false negative rates of just
1.38% and 2.02%, respectively, across all eight strata.

THE OUTCOMES

349
1.38%
2.02%

ALGORITHMSUBMISSIONSFALSE POSITIVERATEFALSE NEGATIVERATECOMPUTER VISION - ACCIDENT PREVENTIONPROXIMITY HAZARD
DETECTION

Struck-by and caught in hazards cause 3 out of every 5 oil and gas industry fatalities.1 Yet the safety risks that are associated with oil and gas
extraction activities are often preventable when appropriate measures
are taken in advance. Even with thorough and routine re-certification on
safety and accident prevention training, vehicle operation, material handling(crane, forklift, winch truck), and rig or equipment repair and maintenance remain the most common causes of fatalities in the industry.2
With the long hours and physical demands of work at drilling sites, it’s
no wonder that even experienced workers make mistakes. One Topcoder
customer in the energy and utilities space sought to find a technology-driven solution to preventing accidents from occuring. They enlisted
our help to create a computer vision tool to help determine the level ofhazard under various vehicle and equipment operation scenarios.
With this in mind, a series of competitions were held to create a toolcapable of analyzing video input and detecting changes in vehicle andequipment direction, changes in the presence and location of people,
and the behaviors of workers in the vicinity (things like mobile phone
usage, smoking, or other potential hazards and distractions).
In industrial settings, this tool can be configured to alert machine or vehicle
operators of risks in real-time or to trigger emergency-stop procedures under
specific circumstances. This way, when the new worker on the job makes a mistake or the sleep-deprived veteran slips up, the results will less often be fatal.

1

https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/oilgaswelldrilling/safetyhazards.html#struck2

https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2017-193/2017-193.pdf?id=10.26616/NIOSHPUB2017193

MACHINE LEARNING - DATA LABELINGFAULT IDENTIFICATION
The identification of faults in oil and gas fields is critical to identifying promising locations and directions
for drilling as well as avoiding unnecessary economic
losses and environmental risks during operations. A
customer approached Topcoder with an interest in bothautomating and enhancing the time-consuming manual
work of labeling 3D seismic volumes as well as teasingout the relationships between intersecting faults.
To make this customer’s fault identification desires areality, Topcoder first turned to its community to build avisualization tool capable of taking 3D array inputs anddisplaying the probabilities of various labelings and interrelationships. After this a larger competition was held,using the customer’s sample data along with the newly
created visualizer to apply labels to each discrete crack
found in the dataset and tease out their relationships.
With 150 submissions representing a variety of problem
solving approaches, a winner was found by comparing
competitors’ work against existing ground truth labels. The
top solution was adept at identifying multiple classes of faults
and their relationships to one another at a speed and degreeof accuracy that provides a significant benefit to our customer
in the form of agility, decision-making, and profitability.

COMPUTER VISION - SAFETY COMPLIANCE

WORKER SAFETY PPEProper use of the right personal protective equipment(PPE) is critical to ensuring the safety of oil and gas workers as well as maintaining compliance with Occupational
Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requirements.
With an occupational fatality rate more than three times
greater than the overall rate for U.S. workers, finding any
way to reduce the risk that workers face is essential.
With the rise of computer vision technology, new opportunities
are available to reduce injuries and fatalities by creating
systems that are ever vigilant of workers’ proper PPE use.
When an energy industry customer approached Topcoder
to explore what could be done to improve the safety of

their workers, we formulated an approach that relied on
our large community to generate labeled data by taking
existing video footage of industrial settings and creating
detailed, minute-by-minute annotations of PPE usage.
A sizable, labeled dataset then allowed Topcoder to run acompetition to generate computer vision algorithms capable ofanalyzing the number and location of workers present in an industrial setting as well as the kinds of PPE they are wearing or
using. This solution gives oil and gas companies the means tocontinually monitor employees at job sites for PPE compliance,
all the while preserving the workers’ privacy and minimizing
any interference or distraction from performing their jobs.

LAYER #1: AGREEMENTS

7 LAYERS OFDATA ANDPROCESSPROTECTIONS
Andy LaMora
Global Director,
Crowd Analytics & AI

Universal internet access and the rise of thegig economy are delivering on the promise of
as-needed, when-needed expert workforces.
The benefits of these workforces are increasingly compelling; customers can expect
their production capacity to flex beyond coreteams with their real-time demand for it, andcan access hard-to-hire skills instantly andas needed, instead of grappling with a job
market that is increasingly difficult to access.
But with the power of a thousand minds
on tap comes the risk of sharing your data
and work with countless strangers. Each ofthese workers may see a slice of your dataor strategic intentions. Concerns over IP
sharing, IP contamination, disclosure, andprivacy naturally follow. Our crowdsourcing
platform was founded in 2001 and has dealt
with these concerns every day since. Both thetools that we use and the methods we employ
to control these risks change year by year as
new tools emerge and ways of doing businesschange. We answer questions about thesemethods in every Q&A, and every deal cycle.
As our Global Director of Crowd Analytics & AI, I thought it would be helpful toshare the latest basics on how Topcoder
mitigates these concerns today withseven distinct layers of security.

It begins with agreements. When you’re acustomer of Wipro and Topcoder, we sign anagreement with you that sets the rules forwhat we can and can’t disclose, as well as
the process for disclosing it — exactly likeany other prudent commercial transaction.
These terms are typically handled in the MSA,
and more stringent requirements can belayered on top when needed, SOW by SOW.
For projects that require them, our contestants digitally sign NDAs as a condition ofaccess to the challenge. There’s sometimes a
misconception that crowdsourcing is uniquein this regard. In reality, customers experiencea commercial relationship with us, completewith standard NDAs and contract terms.

LAYER #2: ATOMIZATION
Topcoder handles projects according to theskill types required — through a process
called atomization. We take the project you’d
like to build and break it down into bite-sized
segments, which become separate challenges(e.g., app design, coding, etc.) that we run
through our community. While this process
was designed to allow us to control timeand delivery, atomization also adds obvious
protection. Think of it like this: members of
our global crowd don’t get to work on Voltron
as a whole; they work on a single robot lion
(or limb) at a time. Workers won’t know there
are other lion robots that assemble into
Voltron unless you want them to. Atomization
drastically and naturally reduces the numberof people who see your entire project, whichis already more protection than a traditional
contractor engagement typically provides.

LAYER #3: PSEUDONYM
We don’t disclose the identity of our customer
to the Topcoder Community. We assign
a pseudonym instead. Generally, it’s thesame pseudonym across all projects forany one customer, but we will also assign
them project by project, or even component

by component, as required for the project’s
security goals. So our members may notrealize that two projects they’re working
on are even for the same customer.

LAYER #4: OBFUSCATION OF DATA
Obfuscation an important, very complex
topic. Obfuscation is a best practice-driven
scrubbing of personal identifiable information(PII) and other sensitive information in orderto mask that data and reduce or eliminate
the likelihood that a worker can correlate itwith anything else in the field, or even who
it’s for. Obfuscation is always a partnershipexercise, and either the data is treated before
it’s handed to us, or Wipro and Topcoder
work with the customer to prepare it. We haveadopted and developed several approaches
for obfuscation. They range from simple
scrambling of PII or key identifiers (e.g., product codes, warehouse IDs, etc.), to statisticallyrigorous replication of reference data tocreate a fabricated, but still relevant data set.

LAYER #5: METAPHORS
A metaphor transposes the domain. Metaphors have long played a role in gamification(see FoldIT and Play To Cure for examples),or abstracting the problem domain from thesolution in order to find new approaches.
They also help in protection. We’ll apply
metaphors when even the basic project
domain or purpose shouldn’t be exposed. To
the extent that any position data is needed,
Topcoder preserves relative but not exact
spatial relationships while moving the scene
to another continent or even planet, and mightpresent the problem as a widget manufacturer instead. This way, we further distancethe data and topic from its presentation tocompetitors on our platform. Together, Wipro
and Topcoder then go on to unwind those
metaphors when we return results to clients.

LAYER #6: DIRECT REVIEWS AND
DIRECT TESTING

UP NEXT AT TOPCODER:DIFFERENTIAL PRIVACY

Our review process uses a two-pronged
approach. One prong is direct, manual review
performed by no fewer than two expert reviewers in our community — members who’ve
proven to be not only technical masters, butalso trustworthy on our platform. For criticalcode reviews, they inspect code line by line
and complete lengthy scorecards, searching for best practices and security flaws.
(Reviewers are unable to see the identity ofthe submitters.) A contestant must first get
past those sentinels if they want a chanceat victory. The second prong is technology.
We also run the code across SAST whennecessary, as well as IP detection platforms.
Mike Morris, our CEO, wrote on this subject inrelation to crowdsourcing as being more secure than traditional means of development.

If concerns about the risks of data sharing
are on the rise, so fortunately are methods for
dealing with it. One promising technique forobfuscation on the ascent is called Differential Privacy (“DP”). DP seeks to replicate
important data in a manner that both breaks
the ability to triangulate data back to reality
while also preserving key relationships.

LAYER #7: RING-FENCED CROWDS
There are times when the project or data simply cannot be shared in any form with the public crowd. Fortunately, this is quite rare. But
in those cases, we are able to develop a subcrowd to work on projects. We will first qualify
workers who are interested, available, and capable of working on the given solution. These
workers are then asked to complete additional
paperwork; past examples include data use
agreements, network use agreements, evenbackground checks. The worker pool may
even include consultants from Wipro or theclient’s other trusted vendors. Only after thispaperwork (and if necessary, location-specific) conditions are met are project details
shared. When necessary, we can also set up
virtual private clouds with I/O restrictions
for their use. But it’s worth noting that thisis a last resort step; reducing the size of theaddressable workforce always has an impact.

To illustrate the point: imagine being able
to replicate a data set of disease patients inan entire state in a manner where hundredsof data scientists can perform tests to seek
precursor signals, without the risk thatsome bad actor can figure out patient orprovider identities. Through our innovation
contract with NASA and in partnership with
NIST, Topcoder will be hosting a Differential
Privacy challenge this November and are
exploring methods to refine these techniques into our standard practice. If you’rea data scientist and would like a chance
to contribute to the solution, click here tostay in the loop and join the contest!

CROWD-POWEREDCONSULTING:ANALYTICS COE,
ENERGY SECTOR
One of the world’s largest independent upstream oil and

TOPCODER’S COMMITMENT TOPRIVACY AND SECURITY

natural gas companies needed to meet a growing demand
from internal customers for data science, design, andAs any security professional will tell you, privacy and security protections is a dynamic fieldthat requires constant diligence. Rest assured,
our methods of protecting our clients, ourmembers, and ourselves, are always evolving.
Security is an intrinsic component ofTopcoder’s offering. It exists in all aspectsof the business — from a customer’s firstinteraction with the platform, to members
registering and competing, to ultimately
delivering solutions. Our platform enables
collaboration yet preserves privacy, allowing
for experimentation with limited risk.

solution development without adding in-house resources.
The answer: a crowd-powered Analytics CoE that combines
Wipro and Topcoder resources and expertise.
CROWDSOURCING ADVANTAGESTHE RESULTS•

Fast start — no waiting for hires•

No turnover — the crowd never quits•

On-demand access to hard-to-find skills(e.g., data science, development, andUI/UX design) with repeatable results

Since December 2017, the Analytics
Consulting team has run over 318
competitions on 39 ideas — with anaverage opportunity ROI of 20x.

ADDITIONALTOPCODER CASESTUDIESDATA VISUALIZATION - EXECUTIVE DASHBOARDPEPSICO 3D MARKET
LEADERSHIP COCKPIT
Like many large organizations, PepsiCo measures the state of its
business across several KPIs to give executives important up-to-date
information and allow them to make the best-informed decisions
possible. Since business performance data from a range of markets
and product categories needed to be consolidated in one place, a
new approach to data visualization was requested from Topoder.
PepsiCo executives needed to be able to quickly scan the information,
view key drivers of the business, and take action based on what the information was telling them. Because of this any dashboard for displaying
the variety of indicators had to be consistent, clear, and concise. When
PepsiCo turned to Topcoder, they received all of this and more.

With a community of designers and business intelligence specialists at the ready, Topcoder delivered 5 separate data visualization solutions and allowed PepsciCo to choose the elementsthat appealed to them the most. The final, combined solution
streamlined the user experience for PepsiCo executives andmade it clear what parts of the business were doing well andwhat areas were underperforming and required additional
focus. 3D visualization techniques were used to allow users
to click into surface data and see a visualization of secondary
information. Across markets, product categories, and channels, PepsiCo’s leaders now have the information they need attheir fingertips to allow them to make data-driven decisions.

USABILITY TESTINGAMERICANPUBLISHINGCOMPANY

07
DAYS

34

QA ENGINEERS

150
ISSUES IDENTIFIED

81
ISSUES ACCEPTEDMedia, news, and publishing is an ever-changing industry, particularly when digital… especially when the greater user experience andcritical workflows are in question. A leading
American publishing company based in Sacramento, California, needed to test their digital
subscription process across multiple browsers on various devices and verify usability ofworkflows surrounding subscriptions, e-editions, and rewards for four news publications.
They came to Topcoder to run a crowdsourced
QA competition. Topcoder instantly onboarded a global QA community for testing theapplications in real-world conditions — on
real devices in real networks, using realuser accounts to sign up and subscribe — touncover defects and insights into end-user
behavior. In just seven days, 34 expert testers
found 81 critical issues and suggested 28 UI/UX enhancements to help move the publishingcompany forward into new target markets.

DNA SEQUENCING ALGORITHM

HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL
Studying the human genome is the world’s
largest project, but the work can be slow—even
with computers.
Renowned for its innovation in medical research andgenomics, Harvard Medical School wanted to speed theprocess of standard DNA sequencing, which is essential formaking precise, high-throughput readouts of the immune
system. A full-time employee had worked for a year to
optimize an algorithm that calculates the distance between
DNA strings, but they wanted to see if more data scientists
working on the problem could deliver even better results.
With an Analytics Starter Pack from Topcoder, Harvard
received on-demand access to more than 120 data scientists who worked to optimize the algorithm for two weeks.
Competitors submitted more than 650 possible solutions
using 89 unique approaches to the problem. The final
result delivered by Topcoder was extraordinary, increasing
the speed of their algorithm from 260.4 minutes to just 16
seconds — 976 times faster. This extreme value outcome
not only enabled Harvard to accelerate their study of genetics as a unified way to extract organizing principles, but
it also shifted the way they approach genetics research.

“Topcoder surpassed expectations: a two-week competition
led to code that was just as good but almost three ordersof magnitude faster... Hard to imagine beating that.”
Ramy Arnaout MD
DPhil Associate Director Clinical Microbiology, Department of Pathology, BIDMC

122
DATA
SCIENTISTS

654

CHALLENGESUBMISSIONS

89

2 WKS

UNIQUEAPPROACHESPROJECTDURECTION

With millions of miles of pipeline acrossthe country, protecting critical fuelsupplies is more difficult than ever.

PIPELINE
THREAT
DETECTIONThe U.S. government wanted to develop an
algorithmic solution to detect and classify
objects within a certain range of energy pipelines—and make monitoring more efficientand secure. Thanks to advances in satellite
capabilities and drone technologies, thenecessary aerial imagery was abundant. But
automatically differentiating between downed
tree limbs and enemy vehicles in those images required a new approach to the problem.
With an Analytics Starter Pack from
Topcoder, the government client received
on-demand access to more than 100
data scientists who worked to develop
algorithmic solutions that detect andevaluate potential risks. A crowd-powered
delivery team managed all logistics during
the three-week project, including testing
the 500+ possible solutions submitted.
The winning solutions rapidly process tensof thousands of images and tag objects
with an appropriate threat level. Today,
the final algorithmic solution delivered byTopcoder is also being used to drive othergovernment research in planetary satellite
classification, Mars reconnaissance, federal
disaster response and recovery, and beyond.

I’m Minal Kanungo, your point person for all
things Energy, Natural Resources, and Utilities
at Topcoder. Questions? Ideas? Projects?
Reach out and let’s get started.

IF YOU’RE READY,
WE’RE READY!

Minal Kanungo
Director North America ENUC
minal.kanungo@topcoder.com

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