Datathon!

#Datathon !

Are you a data superhero who yearns to use your powers for good instead of evil? Would you like to help cure cancer? This event is for you!

Join us for our Open House night in collaboration with Code for Philly (https://www.meetup.com/code-for-philly/)!

This event will launch a program focused on bringing together citizens, software developers, and entrepreneurs across the city to collaboratively create, build, and invent using publicly-released data, code, and technology to solve challenges relevant to our neighborhoods, our cities, our states, and our country.

This event will be overviewing a social-good project followed up with a series of hack-nights, where we will be using predictive analytics, applied machine learning, big data, data warehousing and data science.

The project:

Right now we've got loads of cancer genomics data (http://cancergenome.nih.gov/) from many different types of cancer. In addition, there are many drugs that are approved for use on one type of cancer, but it's entirely possible that they will be useful elsewhere and we don't know it yet.

There's a whole host of machine learning approaches that could be combined with the data to get at questions in this area. We know a lot about the general approaches that would be good to try, but for each specific case life gets a bit more challenging. Participants can spend some time on various aspects of the problem.

Short term goal: generate leads that we can share so that people can start to test them.

Medium term goal: better match patients with treatments that work for their cancers and have minimal side effects.

Long term goal: cure cancer.