About the Competition
Take a deep dive and see how tiny plants and animals fuel the world.
We are pioneering a new language to understand our incredibly beautiful and complex world. A language that is forward-looking rather than retrospective, different from the words of historians and famed novelists. It is data science; and through it, we have the power to use insights from our past to build an unprecedented future. We need your help building that future. The 2014/2015 National Data Science Bowl offers tremendous potential to modernize the way we understand and address a major environmental challenge— monitoring the health of our oceans.
Interested in promoting the National Data Science Bowl? Download our press packet.
Assessing Ocean Health
Like the smallest data point that can be the key to redefining an industry, plankton are key to Earth’s massively intricate ecosystems. A large and thriving plankton population is crucial. These organisms uptake 25% of CO2 released from burning fossil fuels every year. They also form the foundation for marine and terrestrial food chains. Because they are susceptible to small changes in temperature or water chemistry, plankton populations serve as an indicator for broader ocean health. A drop in plankton populations can be a predictor of devastating effects on our world.
Methods for rapidly assessing plankton population distributions and numbers will allow marine biologists to assess ocean health at a scale and speed that has never before been possible. The data are available thanks to sophisticated image capture methods pioneered by Hatfield Marine Science Center and their research partners. Now we are faced with volumes of information that will take years to manually analyze— data collected over one day takes one year to manually analyze! Interested in seeing how the data are collected? Check out this video:
Classify Plankton Species
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!
Discoveries Make an Impact
We will award $175,000 to those able to observe the right patterns, ask the right questions and, in turn, make our beautiful and complex world a little easier to understand and a better place to live. This is the largest Kaggle pursuit ever for a social good problem. More than money, you get the chance at achieving greatness: to work with leaders in the data science field and hone your abilities to make data-driven discoveries that will shape the world around us far into the future. This seemingly small step will have a truly massive impact on our ability to assess ocean and ecosystem health.
Intimidated by the challenge? Don’t be. The National Data Science Bowl is about learning as much as it is about competing. We’ve created a comprehensive tutorial to get you started, and our master-level data scientists will be giving you tips and tricks along the way in their weekly blog posts.