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Oregon State University scientists need techies' help to identify 32 terabytes-worth of images of plankton and other sea life. Seen here: A pterapod plankton.
(Oregon State University)
The marine scientists at Oregon State University need to catalog tens of millions of plankton photos, and they’re willing to pay good money to anyone willing to do the job.
The university's Hatfield Marine Science Center on Monday announced the launch of the National Data Science Bowl, a competition that comes with a $175,000 reward for the best "big data" approach to sorting through the photos.
It’s a job that, done by human hands, would take two lifetimes to finish.
Data crunchers have 90 days to complete their task. Authors of the top three algorithms will share the $175,000 purse and Hatfield will gain ownership of their algorithms.
Booz Allen Hamilton, a technology consulting firm, and Kaggle, a crowdsourcing platform for data competitions, are co-sponsoring the competition with OSU.
The plankton photos come from an 18-day expedition OSU scientists took last summer in the Straits of Florida. There, they amassed 32 terabytes of images of sea life – enough to fill your iPod with 52 years-worth of music.
Competition participants will get access to 100,000 images taken on the expedition, and will be asked to generate an algorithm to identify and monitor them.
Why plankton? According to an OSU release on the competition, they’re "the fundamental biological building blocks of the ocean ecosystem," but they haven’t been studied enough.
Having access to software that can recognize individual plankton species would allow scientists to be more accurate and swift in their work, which focuses on year-over-year fish population fluctuations that might be influenced by plankton.
--Kelly House