Data challenge competitions in the medical field (FR0082)

What is the public problem that the commitment will address? Today health databases are disparate and too small to utilise an artificial intelligence approach. Organising data challenges is an opportunity to collect and centralise relevant health data for research purposes, and make it more accessible to the general public by releasing it as open data shortly after the event.

What is the commitment? The commitment will be to support and organise data challenge projects in partnership with medical stakeholders. Data challenges are data science competitions where participants try to solve problems in the medical field through analysing available data. At the end of the competition, the participants are ranked and prizes are awarded to the very best, offering an incentive to motivate people working on solving healthcare and AI issues. Among other benefits, these innovative events encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations between AI and medicine. The data challenges form part of a comprehensive process to open data and algorithms to everyone.

How will the commitment contribute to solving the public problem? The organisation of these competitions is part of a civic commitment to open data, with three levels: 1. The data challenges are open to the public: Anyone can sign up for a data challenge for a 120 chance to win. The competitions may be held across Europe or the world, and are a chance for participants to get noticed by major stakeholders in the field. 2. The data collected during the data challenges will be made publicly available once the competitions have ended. This opening of data has even greater value as it is usually annotated by medical professionals. 3. The data challenge winners are strongly encouraged to share their algorithmic solutions in an open source format, it being a prerequisite to receive the prize.

Why is this commitment relevant to OGP values? The winning algorithms could help with medical diagnosis and thereby facilitate the decision-making process for medical professionals in their day-to-day work. The data challenges are a key learning tool for students to develop professional skills in data science. They also give the general public the chance – at no cost – to practice working with data to address a given issue encountered in medicine.

Further information The data challenges initiative is funded by the Grand Défi programme: “Improve medical diagnosis through artificial intelligence”, and by the “E-health Acceleration Strategy” for an amount of €200,000 per each data challenge supported.

Action Plan Review

Commitment 32. Promote and expand open data for citizens through data challenges

● Verifiable: Yes

● Does it have an open government lens? Yes

● Potential for results: Unclear