WIKIMEDIA, W.REBELA little friendly competition never hurt anyone, right? But can a healthy dose of rivalry actually solve major medical conundrums and, ultimately, spur innovation?
That’s the motivating idea behind a series of open-source, Big Data computational challenges hosted by Sage Bionetworks and DREAM (Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods) and an ever-increasing number of other companies looking to crowdsource the brightest minds in statistics, machine learning, and computational biology to develop better predictive models of disease. Though teams are pitted against each other in individual competitions, organizers say the challenges promote the kind of collaboration necessary to solve massive biological quandaries.
“A tsunami of omics data have shown us that many diseases we thought were quite simple are increasingly complex with multiple sub-types,” said Stephen Friend, who founded and heads up Sage, a non-profit research organization based in Seattle that has developed technology platforms to facilitate data sharing ...
