Wish I could join a team trying to win this.
“We often find the winners come from electrical engineering and physics,” explains founder and CEO Anthony Goldbloom. “Theyre common-sense disciplines, where people are used to problem-solving. Rather than spending time on questions like Should I be using this algorithm or this system? and What outcomes are we looking for? the engineers and physicists just try to answer the question.”The size of the kitty should pull in quality teams—Heritage says it expects scores of competitors. The question surely seems answerable. But there are concerns that remain. For instance, Goldbloom says that Heritage and Kaggle have worked hard to ensure that the people behind the data set remain anonymous. It seems like an outlandish possibility. But de-anonymization has killed prizes before. Netflix, for instance, pulled its second $1 million public competition after computer scientists figured out who some of the users in the data set were. Goldbloom is working with Canadian researchers who specialize in keeping health information private, as well as with one of the computer scientists who cracked the Netflix prize, to test the data set.But on the first day of the two-year competition, everyone was optimistic. “Im hoping that people will be attracted [to the contest] intellectually and for the betterment of mankind,” Merkin says. “The only way families can have affordable health care is if we try to make the system a little more efficient.”Thats certainly a $3 million question.
via Heritage Health Prize: Is $3 million enough to improve the U.S. health care system? – By Annie Lowrey – Slate Magazine.