Data Science Bowl 2018

The Data Science Bowl, presented by Booz Allen and Kaggle, is the world’s premier data science for social good competition. No single person or organization can meaningfully tackle problems of an immense magnitude, and no one should have to fight alone.

The Data Science Bowl brings together data scientists, technologists, domain experts, and organizations to take on the world’s challenges with data and technology. It’s a platform through which individuals can harness their passion, unleash their curiosity, and amplify their impact to effect change on a global scale.

To present the competition, Booz Allen partnered with Kaggle, the leading online data science competition community with over 760,000 members around the world. During a 90-day period, participants, either alone or working in teams, gain access to unique data sets to develop algorithms that address a specific challenge. And each year, the competition awards hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money to top teams.

It’s hard to see people suffer from illness. Perhaps you’ve lost loved ones to life-threatening diseases. What if there was a way to help find cures faster for almost every disease—from cancer to the common cold? The 2018 Data Science Bowl runs January 16 – April 16, 2018, with its most daring challenge yet: Create a solution to automate nucleus detection. It’s a quest with the potential to move all medical research ahead. During the 90-day competition, data scientists, artists, thinkers, and enthusiasts around the world will compete to create deep-learning algorithms for identifying nuclei, freeing researchers from time-consuming processes to focus on cures. Imagine one solution to combat all threats, from cancer and heart disease to allergies and rare disorders. 

In 2014-2015, participants examined more than 100,000 underwater images, provided by the Hatfield Marine Science Center, to assess ocean health at a massive speed and scale. More than 1,000 teams participated, submitting more than 15,000 solutions to the challenge. The winning team, Team Deep Sea, developed a classification algorithm that beat the current state of the art by more than 10%.

In 2015-2016, they applied analytics in cardiology, transforming the practice of assessing heart function. Though the challenge was decidedly more complex than the prior year, this competition received nearly 1,400 submissions from more than 700 teams. In fact, the winning team, Tencia Lee and Qi Liu, are hedge fund traders, not traditional data scientists.

The momentum behind the Data Science Bowl comes from the collective minds and vision of a world-class team. Our common bond is our passion for trying to solve the previously impossible. We want to challenge ourselves, our colleagues, and data science community to take action and impact the world. We want to show that data science has the power to use insights from our past to build and unprecedented future. We want you to be part of something bigger than any one of us.