More than 60 participants forming 11 teams, took part in the first Vivli Microsoft Data Challenge today at District Hall in Boston. Participants were from universities including Harvard, Northeastern, Brown, and Boston as well as nearby hospitals, pharmaceutical, biotech and software companies.

The data challenge focused on finding innovative solutions for how to safeguard participant privacy and minimize privacy loss while maintaining the scientific analytic value of the data for rare disease data sets that are more highly identifiable.

The day started off with a presentation by patient advocate Jane Perlmutter sharing with the attendees the importance of this challenge.

“I’m a long-term cancer survivor… patients don’t have the luxury of patience, she said. “When they enter a clinical trial, they’re hoping they would profit form it, hoping future generations won’t have to suffer from it as well.”  

The teams had one hour to plan and then four hours to come up with their solutions. They were then given five minutes to present their ideas to the judges.

“The Datathon has met our expectations, there’s a really diverse group of people that are rallying around solving a problem,” Paul Slater, co-founder of the Clinical Research Innovation Hub at Microsoft. “They’re discovering, there’s a bunch of innovative approaches to this, we don’t know if we’re getting an end solution but we may certainly get ourselves closer to it. This might be an opportunity to blend some of the best ideas together to make some meaningful products. The thing we’re going after is high impact.”

The winners are:

Global Grand Prize Winner: 

Team: DBMI

Participants: Gaurav Luthria and Qingbo Wang, Harvard University

Most Innovative Solution:

Team: DataHack

Participants: Cynthia Frommit (IND), Het Patel (Beth Israel), Vikas Gaikwad (Plural Point), Luther Evans (MGH Martinos Center), Annadoir Stavely (Otsuka USA) and Vikramen Karunanidhi (Ayu Devices)

Most Outstanding Graduate Submission:

Team: SAIL

Participants: Megan Fantes, Kinan Dak Albab, Wyatt Howe, Yi Zhang, Peter Flockhart, Lucy Qin from Boston University

Outstanding Remote Submission:

Team: Next Tech Lab

Participants: Sourva Sharan, Arjun Bahuguna from Next Tech Lab

Find out more about the Datathon and see the full list of Datathon submissions.