CrowdAI: the open, data-science challenge platform

crowdAI, an EPFL-developed open data science challenge platform that hosts machine learning competitions, has been awarded over $100,000 from Amazon and Nvidia for its latest challenge, "Learning to Run" . The crowdAI project is an open platform for data-science challenges. It is developed at EPFL, and founded by Marcel Salathé , who is known for his innovative endeavors in the field of applied machine learning, from diagnosing crop diseases to estimating macro-nutrient composition through food images. The idea behind crowdAI is to provide an open source platform for hosting open data science challenges, and inviting the community of data scientists worldwide to develop machine learning algorithms for specified data science problems. To quote the website: "crowdAI connects data science experts and enthusiasts with open data to solve specific problems, through challenges." The challenges span a broad spectrum, from applying deep learning to diagnose plant diseases based on images of symptomatic leaves ( PlantVillage ), to predicting a person's height out of a person's genotype , to teaching a virtual, anatomically accurate skeleton how to walk and run. The last two challenges have been spearheaded by Stanford's Neuromuscular Biomechanics Lab , and their ultimate aim goes beyond mere computer simulation: The aim of the challenge is to find better ways of helping children with cerebral palsy respond to muscle-relaxing surgery. This is a type of intervention that doctors often resort to as a means of improving the patient's gait.