Announced at today's GE's "Minds and Machines" event, the two Quests are organized through the startup Kaggle and for the Hospital Quest will be judged by healthcare experts, while the Flight Quest will be judged based on data. Winners get cash rewards ($500,000 for the Flight Quest and $100,000 for the Hospital Quest) from GE and the chance to get their submission used in a simulation and eventually a real onboard flight management system or hospital patient experience application operated by GE.
For the Flight Quest, the challenge is to create an algorithm for a flight management system that reduces flight delays from the current 18 to 22% inefficiency. The participants in the challenege will get a two month set of data from the National Airspace System, which includes a slew of data such as flight number, origin, destination, take-off time, arrival time, latitude and longitude at frequent interim waypoints along the journey and weather and wind data.
The first phase of the challenge asks participants to come up with a predictive model to increase efficiency. The winner of the first phase will be used to make a simulation that could be developed by GE for onboard flight systems.
For the Hospital Quest, participants are competing to come up with an application for patients to make hospital stays and operations of the hospital more efficient. The idea is to make less hassle for patients and more efficiency for hospitals, which waste an estimated $750 billion to $1.2 trillion per year, GE says. This competition will be judged by representatives from GE, Ochsner Health System and Kaggle.
GE plans to release more in this series of these "Industrial Internet Quests" in 2013 in areas such as healthcare, aviation, rail, oil & gas and power.
