Attention all metagenomicists: put your pinky in the corner of your mouth & say "1 million dollars"

Already posted this to Twitter and Facebook but had to post here too.  This is wild.  DTRA has announced a $1 million prize for metagenomic analysis: DTRA Algorithm Challenge | Landing Page.  From their page

The Prize:
As nth generation DNA sequencing technology moves out of the research lab and closer to the diagnostician’s desktop, the process bottleneck will quickly become information processing. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the Department of Defense are interested in averting this logjam by fostering the development of new diagnostic algorithms capable of processing sequence data rapidly in a realistic, moderate-to-low resource setting. With this goal in mind, DTRA is sponsoring an algorithm development challenge. 

The Challenge:
Given raw sequence read data from a complex diagnostic sample, what algorithm can most rapidly and accurately characterize the sample, with the least computational overhead?

My instinct is to keep this to myself because, well, I want to win.  But my sharing side of things won out and I am posting here.  Maybe we (i..e, the community) can develop an open, collaborative project to do this?  Just a thought …

Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis View all posts by Jonathan Eisen