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."
Crowdsource Coding? (Score:2, Insightful)
Next up on Stack Overflow:
Can some1 pls post the codes for in generic, non-biological terms, such as strings and sub-strings instead of gene sequences and gene segments. full codes pls email me at topcodersplspostfullcodes@hotmail.com
What a fuckin' scam...FTFA
The US$6,000 contest was launched by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Business School, both in Boston, ....
Their contest ran for two weeks and awarded weekly $500 prizes to top performers.
In total, 122 people submitted computer programs to characterize the genes involved in immune responses. Half of the entrants were professional computer programmers, yet none worked as computational biologists. Contestants spent an average of 22 hours on the problem, accumulating a total of nearly 2,700 hours of development time.
Who do you want to bet owns the copyright?
How about open source instead of $6000 tossed at a starving pack of desperate coders to solve "Big Data" problems for them.
not much return (Score:5, Insightful)
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?