[theatraine]

Biomedical applications of machine learning have great potential, but they suffer from a lack of data problem. It's great to see Little championing for a more open database, hopefully it has a positive effect.

For more traditional machine learning research, there are common sets of data (i.e. MNIST for handwriting recognition) which serve to benchmark new algorithms.

The main problem with biomedical data is the difficulty of acquisition, and the fact that many researchers are afraid of discovering findings that they may have missed.

[jedberg]

I agree completely. Every time I do a talk on Big Data, especially to practitioners, I throw in a little speech about how sharing medical data could lead to one of the greatest periods of medical advancement ever.

The hard part is getting the privacy right.