Crowdsourced Coders Take On Immunology Big Data 31
ewenc writes "Mercenary computer coders are helping scientists cope with the deluge of data pouring out of research labs. A contest to write software to analyze immune-system genes garnered more than 100 entries, including many that vastly outperformed existing programs. The US$6,000 contest was launched by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Business School, both in Boston, Massachusetts. TopCoder.com, a community of more than 400,000 coders who compete in programming competitions, hosted the contest. The results are described in a letter published this week in Nature Biotechnology."
Re:not much return? think again. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's too bad the winning entry, at 970x the speed of the algo it replaced, only received $6k. Surely this was worth a lot more to the eggheads than that? You'd have difficulty contracting even simple, low grade code for that amount?
I think you're overlooking the fact that a coder who wins the contest gets something far more valuable: a demonstrable proof of one's mettle and a fairly admirable accomplishment that can only pay dividends for years to come when they're hired by a company who pays them what they're really worth.