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December 21, 2014

$175K to Identify Plankton

Filed under: Classification,Data Science,Machine Learning — Patrick Durusau @ 10:20 am

Oregon marine researchers offer $175,000 reward for ‘big data’ solution to identifying plankton by Kelly House.

From the post:

The marine scientists at Oregon State University need to catalog tens of millions of plankton photos, and they’re willing to pay good money to anyone willing to do the job.

The university’s Hatfield Marine Science Center on Monday announced the launch of the National Data Science Bowl, a competition that comes with a $175,000 reward for the best “big data” approach to sorting through the photos.

It’s a job that, done by human hands, would take two lifetimes to finish.

Data crunchers have 90 days to complete their task. Authors of the top three algorithms will share the $175,000 purse and Hatfield will gain ownership of their algorithms.

From the competition description:

The 2014/2015 National Data Science Bowl challenges you to create an image classification algorithm to automatically classify plankton species. This challenge is not easy— there are 100 classes of plankton, the images may contain non-plankton organisms and particles, and the plankton can appear in any orientation within three-dimensional space. The winning algorithms will be used by Hatfield Marine Science Center for simpler, faster population assessment. They represent a $1 million in-kind donation by the data science community!

There is a comprehensive tutorial to get you started and weekly blog posts on the contest.

You may also see this billed as the first National Data Science Bowl.

The contest runs from December 15, 2014 until March 16, 2015.

Competing is free and even if you don’t win the big prize, you will have gained valuable experience from the tutorials and discussions during the contest.

I first saw this in a tweet by Gregory Piatetsky

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