Million Dollar Challenge Shares AWS Leadership Principles

“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” 

This quote by Warren Bennis, founding chairman of The Leadership Institute at USC’s Marshall School of Business, exemplifies why TigerGraph created its Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge. 

Graph technology adoption continues to expand as organizations experience enormous benefits. As a leader in graph analytics, we deliver deep insights for a wide range of solutions, such as customer 360, supply chain analysis, and fraud and compliance. We designed the Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge to help democratize graph technology for all by making the technology and resources available to contestants, including students, nonprofits, startups, data scientists, and others. Contestants can develop innovative solutions for business success or for any problem they are passionate about solving.

Open to everyone, the Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge seeks creative technological solutions for problems like climate change, public transportation, and public health. Contestants select their cloud infrastructure, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), and a problem statement that matches their vision of how to improve the world with graph. 

“TigerGraph’s Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge is a fantastic opportunity for the most curious and innovative academics, entrepreneurs, and data scientists to solve a global problem they are passionate about,” said Sabina Joseph, General Manager of Technology Partners at Amazon Web Services (AWS). “AWS provides the infrastructure needed to support large-scale, global initiatives for non-profits, NGOs, and enterprises. We are happy to support the Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge because it aligns with three of Amazon’s guiding Leadership Principles: Learn and Be Curious, Think Big, and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility. We use these principles to drive the strategy for the company and the actions of every Amazonian.” 

Learn and Be Curious

When developing our graph analytics platform, we implemented creative techniques, including auto-partitioning and parallel processing, that enable the platform to handle massive amounts of data quickly. TigerGraph encourages developers worldwide to learn more about graph and discover new ways to utilize this powerful technology. 

We offer many resources to educate developers on graph technology and its platform. Our Cloud Starter Kits provide sample graph data schema, datasets, and queries. Choose a use case such as fraud detection, recommendation engine, supply chain analysis, or from a specific industry such as healthcare or pharmaceutical to get started. 

The Most Innovative project is among the prize categories offered in the Graph For All Challenge. Can developers devise a new, never-imagined use of knowledge graphs? We believe it’s possible!

Think Big

Our team and customers push the limits of graph technology every day. As an enterprise-scalable graph platform, TigerGraph loads terabytes of data in just a few hours and performs graph traversals of 3-10+ hops across hundreds of millions of nodes and edges with sub-second results to deliver real-time analytics and deep insights. 

With the Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge, we’re also thinking big. The contest is global in scope, with partners, judges, domain experts, and contestants spread across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia. It also highlights the immense possibilities that graph offers to analytics in solving complex world issues like predicting global crises, detecting COVID-19 mutated variants early, and managing personally identifiable data. 

Another prize category for the Graph for All challenge is the Most Ambitious project. This category takes into account the number of datasets connected, the volume of node and edge types included, and the number of industries touched. 

In essence, thinking big algorithmically. 

Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility

We share Amazon’s sentiment that companies can and should do good in the world beyond the scope of their immediate business goals. 

From its launch in 2006, AWS grew to provide cloud infrastructure that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries. Continued growth across business entities led Amazon to add a Leadership Principle in late 2021 to reflect its commitment to social responsibility. 

The new Leadership Principle states, “…Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large … we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow … and always leave things better than how [we] found them.” 

When TigerGraph emerged in 2017 from five years in stealth mode, we quickly became known as experts in graph analytics due to our ability to join and connect multiple and extensive data sources to answer previously unanswerable questions. 

The Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge shows that companies of all sizes – in TigerGraph’s case, a 300+ person organization – can think big, address social responsibility, and make an impact. One of the problem statements available to contestants in the challenge is Graph for a Better World: Enable Search for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. 

This problem statement poses the question of how a knowledge graph system has the potential to enable collective intelligence and coordination of interconnected social, environmental, and economic factors that could represent urgent, life-saving action for billions of people worldwide. Factors include poverty, hunger, good health and well-being, quality education, clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, and more. 

Could this problem statement end up creating the winner of the Most Impactful prize? It’s judged on the level of impact on social good and significant benefit to the community at large.

If TigerGraph and AWS inspire you to do something good for your community, and you want to help bring TigerGraph’s vision of graph technology being the catalyst of socio-economic change to reality, register for the Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge today.