NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge Series
From the webpage:
Welcome to the Asteroid Grand Challenge Series sponsored by the NASA Tournament Lab! The Asteroid Grand Challenge Series will be comprised of a series of topcoder challenges to get more people from around the planet involved in finding all asteroid threats to human populations and figuring out what to do about them. In an increasingly connected world, NASA recognizes the value of the public as a partner in addressing some of the country’s most pressing challenges. Click here to learn more and participate in our debut challenge, Asteroid Data Hunter – launching 03/17/14!
From the details page:
The Asteroid Data Hunter challenge tasks competitors to develop significantly improved algorithms to identify asteroids in images from ground-based telescopes. The winning solution must increase the detection sensitivity, minimize the number of false positives, ignore imperfections in the data, and run effectively on all computers.
This is radically cool!
Lots of data, difficult problem, high stakes (ELE (extinction level event) prevention).