Notable competitions include gesture recognition for Microsoft Kinect,[12] making a football AI for Manchester City, coding a trading algorithm for Two Sigma Investments,[13] and improving the search for the Higgs boson at CERN.

For most competitions, submissions are scored immediately (based on their predictive accuracy relative to a hidden solution file) and summarized on a live leaderboard.

After the deadline passes, the competition host pays the prize money in exchange for "a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable and royalty-free license [...] to use the winning Entry", i.e. the algorithm, software and related intellectual property developed, which is "non-exclusive unless otherwise specified".

Kaggle offers a free tool for data science teachers to run academic machine-learning competitions.

Kaggle's competitions have resulted in successful projects such as furthering HIV research,[17] chess ratings[18] and traffic forecasting.

[citation needed] Vlad Mnih (one of Hinton's students) used deep neural networks to win a competition hosted by Adzuna.

Kaggle has implemented a progression system to recognize and reward users based on their contributions and achievements within the platform.