Big Data Challenge Series

About the Challenge

NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, announced Oct. 3, 2012, the launch of the Big Data Challenge – a series of ideation competitions hosted through the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL).  The Big Data Challenge series will apply the process of Open Innovation (OI) to the goal of conceptualizing new and novel approaches to utilizing “Big Data” information sets residing in various agency silos while remaining consistent with individual United States agencies missions related to the field of health, energy and earth sciences.

Competitors will be tasked with imagining analytical techniques and software tools that utilize Big Data from discrete government information domains and then describing how they may be shared as universal, cross-agency solutions that transcend the limitations of individual silos. The competition will be run by the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL), a collaboration between Harvard University and TopCoder, a competitive community of digital creators.

“The ability to create new applications and algorithms using diverse data sets is a key element of the NTL,” said Jason Crusan, Director of Advanced Exploration Systems at NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. “NASA is excited to see the results that open innovation can provide to these big data applications.”