(gigaom.com) -- Even GE respects the wisdom of the crowd. The manufacturer joined up with Alaska Airlines, the Ochsner Health System and Kaggle in November to ask outside data scientists and designers to help give pilots actionable data and make hospital visits and subsequent care more efficient.
The organizers of the first Industrial Internet Quests have since received more than 3,000 submissions and were expecting to announce on Wednesday the contestants who will receive a total of $600,000. One submission for the flight competition has earned $100,000 for its developers, a five-person team from Singapore.
Kaggle has hosted data-science competitions for several other brand-name companies, from Facebook to Ford. Its publicly available leaderboards make data science a bit like a spectator sport, and open-source education on machine learning and natural-language processing makes it possible for lots of people to compete.
Demand is sky-high for data scientists and application developers, and farming out one-off projects is a common practice in all sorts of industries. That’s why it’s not surprising to see even big companies like GE turning to the crowd for data science solutions. And it’s why this sort of news could become more common in the future.
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