Microsoft announces the winners of the Women’s Health Risk Assessment competition

Microsoft yesterday announced the winners of the Women’s Health Risk Assessment competition, a contest they launched on the Cortana Intelligence Competition Platform back in July this year.

Based on the World Health Organization (WHO) report in 2011, about 820,000 women and men aged 15-24 were newly infected with HIV in developing countries. Among these newly infected, more than 60% were women. Developing countries face serious reproductive health problems such as sexually transmitted infections (STIs), unintended pregnancies, and complications from childbirth. Emphasize prevention and provision of information about STIs and other reproductive tract infections (RTIs) was listed as one of the top priorities for policymakers, researchers, and health care providers.

To help achieve the goal of improving women’s reproductive health outcomes in underdeveloped regions, this competition was announced to develop machine learning solutions so that a patient can be accurately categorized into different health risk segments and subgroups. Based on the categories that a patient falls in, healthcare providers can offer an appropriate education and training program to patients. Such customized programs have a better chance to help reduce the reproductive health risk of patients.

Microsoft received 2,392 entries from 493 contest participants and today they announced the Top 3 competition prize winners, along with their published ML experiments. Find the winners list below.

• Grand Prize: Ion Kleopas – Predictive Experiment
• Second Place: Nailong Zhang – Training Experiment and Predictive Experiment
• Third Place: David Eduardo Millan Calero – Predictive Experiment

Microsoft is now working with the Gates Foundation to put these winning ML models to work in the real world to make a difference in the lives of women in these HIV-affected regions.

Read more about this contest from the link below.