biolgeek - Slashdot User

Submission + - World Cup forecasting challenge (kaggle.com)

Submitted by databuff on Thursday June 03, 2010 @10:03PM

databuff writes: As a break from projecting the strength of subprime mortgages, credit default swaps and other obscure financial instruments, quantitative analysts at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, UBS and Danske Bank have modeled the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Now Kaggle has set up a forecasting competition, allowing statisticians to go head-to-head with these corporate giants. The challenge is to predict how far each country will progress in the tournament. If the banks know as much about soccer as they do about subprime mortgages, the statisticians are in with a good chance.

Comment Re:Wow (Score 1) 52

by biolgeek on Wednesday May 05, 2010 @06:49PM (#32105578) Attached to: Crowdsourcing HIV Research

People often refer to 99designs logo competitions as crowdsourcing designs (http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/04/28/99designs-crowdsourcing-works/). On that basis, I think this classifies as crowdsourcing.

Submission + - Crowdsourcing HIV research

Submitted by biolgeek on Wednesday May 05, 2010 @01:33AM

biolgeek writes: In recent years, HIV has been managed with a collection of therapies. However, the virus will likely evolve around these drugs, making it crucially important to get a better understanding of the virus itself. An important step in understanding the virus is to get a handle on its genetic blueprint. William Dampier of Drexler University is taking a novel approach to this research by crowdsourcing his problem. He is hosting a bioinformatics competition, which requires contestants to find markers in the HIV sequence that predict a change in the severity of the infection (as measured by viral load). So far the best entry comes from Fontanelles, an HIV research group, who has been able to predict a change in viral load with 66 per cent accuracy.

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