- The Department of Homeland Security announces a $1.5M contest in conjunction with Google (GOOG, GOOGL) for better screening algorithms that can identify concealed items in airport body scanners.
- The government provides the financial backing for the contest while Google provides the platform via its recently required Kaggle data science website.
- Data scientists can use any algorithm-building technique desired, but neural networking might dominate the entries due to its ability to scan vast amounts of data and learn from the results.
- The government hopes the winning algorithm will improve the detection abilities while improving efficiency of human workers at the airport checkpoints.