HeroX continues their goal to assist those who tackle problems or opportunities of far reaching importance. Their latest two challenges look at data anonymization, and controlling corrosion on hydraulic steel structures (HSS) in the United States. Known as the SAP’s Data Anonymization Challenge and the Rust Busters Challenge respectively, both contests are currently accepting pre-signups.
The SAP challenge recognizes the importance of data access for businesses in today’s global marketplace, but also sees the critical element of assuring there is data privacy. Progress in business intelligence gained through machine learning and AI-driven insights occurs when data silos are broken enabling researchers to work with realistic documents.
This Challenge offers $60,000 in total prizes to applicants able to pick out personally-identifying information in semi-structured data, and then anonymize it. This includes bounding boxes with personal names, addresses, phone numbers, signatures, and any handwritten notes. Applicants entering the Challenge receive 25,000 invoices from publicly available datasets to use in their proof-of-concept model.
The Rust Busters Challenge, however, comes from a collaboration between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and the Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation). In addressing U.S. water infrastructure and corrosion measures, old methods of protecting steel structures have safety and environmental concerns, while newer approaches have high costs with lower efficacy.
The new contest has two phases. Applicants submit paper ideas for their corrosion control idea and the supporting data for Phase 1. Five winners from Phase 1 proceed to Phase 2, where their technologies are demonstrated with test coupons from Reclamation. Each Phase 1 Winner receives $50,000 to support their efforts, and three Phase 2 winners share the final prize of $100,000.
The Data Anonymization Challenge opens applications opened on September 5th, 2019, while Rust Busters will accept applications from September 19th, 2019 to January 16th, 2020.
