Accretive Health Data Scientist Wins Marinexplore and Cornell University Whale Detection Challenge on Kaggle
Nick Kridler, senior data scientist at Accretive Health, Inc. (NYSE: AH) recently won first place in the Marinexplore and Cornell University Whale Detection Challenge, a data mining competition hosted by Kaggle. The contest asked data scientists to create an algorithm to detect North Atlantic right whale calls from audio recordings as part of an ongoing effort to prevent collisions with shipping traffic.
Two hundred and forty nine teams took the challenge, competing for the $10,000 prize. Each team understood the importance of the project: finding a way to guide ships from colliding with the endangered 400 North Atlantic right whales. Marinexplore is working to organize ocean data with others by developing datasets consisting of acoustic recordings that can be used to detect species inhabiting the ocean. Cornell University's Bioacoustic Research Program has deployed a 24/7 buoy network to guide ships from colliding with the North Atlantic right whales.
“There is a characteristic ‘up-call' that right whales make and that is the sound that is identified by the auto-detection buoys,” said Kridler, a resident of Evanston, Ill. “I like to challenge myself with interesting data mining problems in new domains and this was a tough problem to solve, but that's what made it fun.”
This wasn't the first Kaggle accolade for Kridler, whose team has placed in the top 10 in the two-year, $3 million Heritage Health Prize competition (the identities of the top 10 teams will be revealed at the Health Data Consortium's Health Datapalooza conference June 3-4, 2013, in Washington, DC.). That competition attracted more than 1,660 teams worldwide and used a de-identified medical record dataset to see who could best predict how many days patients will spend in the hospital in the next year. The technology developed in the competition will be used to decrease the number of avoidable hospitalizations in the United States.
“We couldn't be more proud of Nick,” said Scott Nicholson, chief data scientist at Accretive Health. “We're building a world-class team of data scientists who solve problems both within and outside of their domain of expertise, and Nick's accomplishment clearly underscores that."
About Accretive Health
At Accretive Health, our mission is to help our healthcare clients strengthen their financial stability and deliver better care at a more affordable cost to the communities they serve, increasing healthcare access for all. For more information, visit www.accretivehealth.com.