Partners HealthCare
Biobank Disease Challenge
These are the official rules that govern how the Biobank Disease Challenge will operate. This challenge will be simply referred to as the “challenge” throughout the rest of these rules and may be abbreviated on our website, in our documentation, and other publications as BDC.
In these rules, “organizers”, “we,” “our,” and “us” refer to Partners HealthCare (Partners); "participant”, “you,” and “yourself” refer to an eligible challenge participant.
Partners is conducting an artificial intelligence and machine learning data analytics challenge. The focus of this challenge is to enable major translational data science players to leverage the Partners HealthCare Biobank Repository to develop phenotypic algorithms that will aid in determining a patient’s disease status.
This is a skill-based challenge and chance plays no part in the determination of the winner(s). All eligible entries received will be judged using the criteria described.
The registered participants will be notified by email of any change in the schedule.
You are eligible to enter this challenge if you meet the following requirements: (a) You are an individual or a team of people (maximum of 4) desiring to contribute to the tasks of the challenge and accepting to follow its rules; and (b) You are a United States institution with an established reputation. (c) You are not an immediate family (parent, sibling, spouse, or child) or household member of an employee of Partners or Dell/EMC or a person involved in any part of the administration and execution of this challenge. (d) Your United States institution is willing to sign a Data Use Agreement with Partners Healthcare.
Download Official Rules Document - Here
To be eligible for judging, an entry must meet the following content/technical requirements:
Other than what is set forth below, we are not claiming any ownership rights to your entry. However, by submitting your entry, you:
If you do not want to grant us these rights to your entry, please do not enter this challenge.
Partners will select a panel of judges to judge the entries; all judges will be forbidden to enter the challenge and will be experts in diseases, statistics, machine learning, or a related field, or experts in challenge organization. The judges will review all eligible entries received and select three (3) winners based upon the following aspects of the challenge:
The decisions of these judges are final and binding. The distribution of prizes according to the decisions made by the judges will be made within three (3) months after completion of the last round of the challenge. If we do not receive a sufficient number of entries meeting the entry requirements, we may, at our discretion based on the above criteria, not award any or all of the challenge prizes below.
Partners is the financial sponsor of this challenge. The following prize awards are as follows:
If there is any change to data, schedule, instructions of participation, or these rules, the registered participants will be notified at the email they provided with the registration.
If you are a potential winner, we will notify you by sending a message to the e-mail address listed on your final entry within fourteen days following the determination of winners. If the notification that we send is returned as undeliverable, or you are otherwise unreachable for any reason, we may award the prize to an alternate winner, unless forbidden by applicable law.
Winners who have entered the challenge as a team will be responsible to share any prize among their members. The prize will be delivered to the registered team leader. If this person becomes unavailable for any reason, the prize will be delivered to be the authorized account holder of the e-mail address used to make the winning entry.
If you are a potential winner, we may require you to sign a declaration of eligibility, use, indemnity and liability/publicity release and applicable tax forms. If you do not sign and return these required forms within the time period listed on the winner notification message, we may disqualify you and select an alternate selected winner.
Any changes in the rules as well as the names of confirmed winners (after challenge decisions are made by the judges) will be posted on this portal.
By entering this challenge, you agree:
If an unforeseen or unexpected event (including, but not limited to: someone cheating; a virus, bug, or catastrophic event corrupting data or the submission platform; someone discovering a flaw in the data or modalities of the challenge) that cannot be reasonably anticipated or controlled, (also referred to as force majeure) affects the fairness and / or integrity of this challenge, we reserve the right to cancel, change or suspend this challenge. This right is reserved whether the event is due to human or technical error. If a solution cannot be found to restore the integrity of the challenge, we reserve the right to select winners based on the criteria specified above from among all eligible entries received before we had to cancel, change or suspend the challenge subject to obtaining the approval.
Computer “hacking” is unlawful. If you attempt to compromise the integrity or the legitimate operation of this challenge by hacking or by cheating or committing fraud in any way, we may seek damages from you to the fullest extent permitted by law. Further, we may ban you from participating in any of our future challenges, so please play fairly.
Please read the privacy policy on the challenge entry page before accepting the official rules and submitting your entry. Note that by accepting the official rules you are also accepting the terms of the Partners privacy policy [insert link].
Leadership and Project Management: | Architecture, Applications and Engineering: | Business Development and Methodology Subject Matter Experts: |
Shawn N. Murphy, MD, Ph.D. Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School Partners HealthCare, Chief Research Information Officer Dr. Murphy leads Research Information Science and Computing at Partners HealthCare (RISC) and invented, established, and continues the development of the Research Patient Data Registry (RPDR). Originally released in 1999, the RPDR connects human studies investigators to vast amounts of patient clinical data.
Brent G. Richter
John K. Vide, MBA |
Michael E. Mendis Partners HealthCare Team Lead II, Research Information Science and Computing Mike has worked on various NIH funded grants such as Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2), PCORI and Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K). He has over 20 years of experience in the IT field.
Edana K. Merchan, Ph.D.
Eloy Toscano
Kevin M. Mullins
Robert Small |
Victor M. Castro Partners HealthCare Data Scientist, Research Information Science and Computing Victor is a medical informaticist focused on developing tools and methods to analyze electronic health record and other biomedical data sources and a wiz with IRB and Legal documents and processes
Anika Heavener |