Kaggle hosting million dollar competition to improve lung cancer detection

Kaggle, which was founded as a platform for predictive modelling and analytics competitions on which companies and researchers post their data and statisticians and data miners from all over the world compete to produce the best models, is hosting a competition with a million dollar prize to improve the classification of potentially cancerous lesions in the lungs.

This isn’t the first time that major prize money has been given away to accelerate research in targeted areas. The Data Science Bowl featured a competition last year to identify signs of heart failure with a $200,000 purse and the year before it tasked data scientists to assess ocean health.

The $1 million going towards this year’s competition will be the most ever given out as a prize on the site. The first place winner will receive $500,000 with second and third getting $200,000 and $100,000 respectively. The next seven contenders by rank will each receive $25,000.

Kaggle was founded in 2010 by Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner. It initially raised $11 million in the form of a Series A from Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures and others.

Though the 2017 Data Science Bowl just launched this morning, it has already drawn in 300 team submissions. Goldbloom acknowledged that most of these submissions are likely just an attempt to beat the competition benchmark for pride — competitors get to submit five submissions per day until the event ends on April 12th, 2017.

After teams finish building and submitting their models using lung image scans provided by the National Cancer Institute, the goal is that the creations can be used to tangibly reduce the high false positive rate that makes today’s solutions inadequate.

Read the full article from Techcrunch here.


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