Nature Biotechnology volume 31, pages 108–111 (2013)Cite this article
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Advances in biotechnology have fueled the generation of unprecedented quantities of data across the life sciences. However, finding analysts who can address such 'big data' problems effectively has become a significant research bottleneck. Historically, prize-based contests have had striking success in attracting unconventional individuals who can overcome difficult challenges. To determine whether this approach could solve a real big-data biologic algorithm problem, we used a complex immunogenomics problem as the basis for a two-week online contest broadcast to participants outside academia and biomedical disciplines. Participants in our contest produced over 600 submissions containing 89 novel computational approaches to the problem. Thirty submissions exceeded the benchmark performance of the US National Institutes of Health's MegaBLAST. The best achieved both greater accuracy and speed (1,000 times greater). Here we show the potential of using online prize-based contests to access individuals without domain-specific backgrounds to address big-data challenges in the life sciences.
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Harvard Business School's Division of Research and Faculty Development funded the prize money and supported K.R.L., E.L., C.B. and A.M. K.R.L. and K.J.B. were also supported by the NASA Tournament Lab, which is funded by the NASA Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. E.C.G. was supported by the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center (NCRR 5UL1RR025758 and 5UL1RR025758-S), and R.A.A. was supported by the Klarman Family Foundation. P.-R.L. was supported by US National Defense Science and Engineeering and US National Science Foundation graduate research fellowships.
Author information Author notesKarim R Lakhani, Kevin J Boudreau, Ramy A Arnaout and Eva C Guinan: These authors contributed equally.
Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Karim R Lakhani, Carliss Baldwin, Eric Lonstein & Alan MacCormack
Harvard-NASA Tournament Lab, Institute for Quantitative Social Science,
Karim R Lakhani & Kevin J Boudreau
London Business School, London, UK
Kevin J Boudreau
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Po-Ru Loh
TopCoder.com, Glastonbury, Connecticut, USA
Lars Backstrom & Mike Lydon
Department of Pathology and Division of Clinical Informatics, Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Ramy A Arnaout
Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Ramy A Arnaout & Eva C Guinan
Department of Radiation Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Eva C Guinan
Correspondence to Eva C Guinan.
Ethics declarations Competing interestsM.L. is employed by TopCoder.com. L.B. was a paid consultant to TopCoder.com at the time the contest was designed and executed.
Supplementary information About this article Cite this articleLakhani, K., Boudreau, K., Loh, PR. et al. Prize-based contests can provide solutions to computational biology problems. Nat Biotechnol 31, 108–111 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2495
Published: 07 February 2013
Issue Date: February 2013
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2495
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