As the premier global competition harnessing data science for social good, the annual Booz Allen Data Science Bowl welcomed the contributions of data scientists, technologists, and domain experts from the public and private sectors. Each year for five consecutive years, our motivated community tackled a large-scale social, environmental, or health challenge together. Individuals and teams from all over the world participated. With over 50,000 participants and more than 114,000 submissions, our goal was to demonstrate how data science can ignite the way to a better world. The tools we used were data, technology, and the power of crowdsourced collaboration. The Data Science Bowl went into strategic pause after the 2019 event.
At the heart of every Data Science Bowl was a shared purpose of meaningfully addressing immense problems and working to remove barriers from the lives of people and communities everywhere. Through this “one challenge, one competition” approach, the Data Science Bowl pointed the way toward solutions in many critically important areas:
In 2015, participants examined 100,000 underwater images to assess ocean health, with more than 1,000 teams submitting over 17,000 solutions. The winning team developed a classification algorithm that beat the state of the art by more than 10 percent.
In 2016, participants applied analytics to cardiology to transform the practice of assessing heart function. Supported by the National Institutes of Health, the competition received nearly 9,300 submissions from more than 700 teams.
In 2017, nearly 2,400 teams worked to improve lung cancer screening technology, submitting more than 18,000 algorithms. The top 10 solutions outperformed best-in-class models by an estimated 10 percent.
The 2018 competition brought together nearly 18,000 participants who submitted more than 68,000 algorithms and worked an estimated 288,000 hours to automate the vital research process of nuclei detection.
In 2019, we partnered with television broadcaster PBS Kids to improve app-based learning for young people. Thousands of competition participants used AI to analyze game-play data and predict user performance on math assessments, informing upgrades to educational media.
