Tangent Works Uses Julia to Win IEEE Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2017

Piscataway, NJ – Tangent Works used Julia to win the IEEE Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2017 (GEFCom2017).

Tangent Works is a European machine learning company that conducts real time energy forecasting.

Out of 177 competition teams, Tangent Works was one of just two competitors to win both the qualifying match and the final match.

According to Jan Dolinsky, Chief Technology Officer at Tangent Works, “We relied 100% on Julia to win this competition. At the core of our product we do numerous matrix operations where we rely heavily on unique aspects of the language such as out of the box support of SIMD instruction sets, direct access to BLAS, broadcasting, syntactic loop fusion and others.”

Dr. Tao Hong, Chair of the IEEE Working Group on Energy Forecasting and General Chair of the Global Energy Forecasting Competition explains:

  • “More than 300 students and professional from more than 30 countries formed 177 teams” to compete.
  • “GEFCom2017 is the longest and most challenging among the series of Global Energy Forecasting Competitions. To encourage the contestants to explore opportunities in the big data world, GEFCom2017 released more data than the previous competitions combined.”
  • “The theme is hierarchical probabilistic load forecasting. The 6-month-long GEFCom2017 includes two phases. The qualifying match was to provide medium term probabilistic forecasts for the ISO New England region in real time. The final match asked the contestants to provide probabilistic forecasts for 161 delivery points.”

Julia is the fastest high performance open source computing language for data, analytics, algorithmic trading, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and many other domains. Julia solves the two language problem by combining the ease of use of Python and R with the speed of C++. Julia provides parallel computing capabilities out of the box and unlimited scalability with minimal effort. For example, Julia has run at petascale on 650,000 cores with 1.3 million threads to analyze over 56 terabytes of data using Cori, the world’s sixth-largest supercomputer. With more than 1.2 million downloads and +161% annual growth, Julia is one of the top programming languages developed on GitHub. Julia adoption is growing rapidly in finance, insurance, machine learning, energy, robotics, genomics, aerospace, medicine and many other fields.

Julia Computing was founded in 2015 by all the creators of Julia to develop products and provide professional services to businesses and researchers using Julia. Julia Computing offers the following products:

  • JuliaPro for data science professionals and researchers to install and run Julia with more than one hundred carefully curated popular Julia packages on a laptop or desktop computer.
  • JuliaRun for deploying Julia at scale on dozens, hundreds or thousands of nodes in the public or private cloud, including AWS and Microsoft Azure.
  • JuliaFin for financial modeling, algorithmic trading and risk analysis including Bloomberg and Excel integration, Miletus for designing and executing trading strategies and advanced time-series analytics.
  • JuliaDB for in-database in-memory analytics and advanced time-series analysis.
  • JuliaBox for students or new Julia users to experience Julia in a Jupyter notebook right from a Web browser with no download or installation required.

To learn more about how Julia users deploy these products to solve problems using Julia, please visit the Case Studies section on the Julia Computing Website.

Julia users, partners and employers hiring Julia programmers in 2017 include Amazon, Apple, BlackRock, Capital One, Citibank, Comcast, Disney, Facebook, Ford, Google, IBM, Intel, KPMG, Microsoft, NASA, Oracle, PwC, Uber, and many more.

Tangent Works is a European machine learning company providing the next generation of prediction solutions for businesses by automating the predictive model building process. With its breakthrough solution, TIM, companies can now generate accurate predictive models for time series analysis in seconds, fully automatic, as a transparent formula providing useful insights about the dynamics hidden in the data. TIM eliminates the data science skills burden, and is extremely efficient on computing time which allows machine learning solutions to be executed directly on a device. The core of the technology is applicable for a variety of advanced analytics challenges such as time series analysis, complex pattern recognition, anomaly detection and classification. Tangent Works was initiated in 2013 by four experienced partners, combining advanced machine learning knowledge, software product development, and years of international marketing & sales development in high tech environments. The company employs 15 specialists in offices in Belgium and Slovakia.