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Challenges are being increasingly viewed as a mechanism to foster advances in a number of domains including healthcare and medicine. The US Federal government, as part of the open government initiative has underscored the role of challenges https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/us_national_action_plan_6p.pdf as a way to "promote innovation through collaboration and (to) harness the ingenuity of the American Public." Large quantities of publicly available data and cultural changes in the openness of science have now made it possible to use these challenges and crowdsourcing efforts to propel the field forward.

Sites such as Kaggle https://www.kaggle.com/ , Innocentive http://www.innocentive.com/ and TopCoder http://www.topcoder.com/ , Innocentive, and TopCoder are being used increasing in the computer science and data science communities in a range of creative ways. These are being leveraged by commercial entities such as Walmart in finding qualified employees while rewarding participants with monetary prizes as well as less tangible rewards such as public acknowledgement of their efforts for advancing the field.

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