NIOSH announces crowdsourcing competition on using AI to streamline worker safety and health data

Washington — NIOSH has launched an open competition for artificial intelligence programmers as part of a search for ways to automate data processing in occupational safety and health surveillance systems.

In an Oct. 24 press release, the agency describes injury recording as “a person writing a narrative about the incident,” adding that someone else then reads these narratives and assigns codes to classify the injuries, “which has resulted in time, cost and the risk of human error influencing occupational safety and health data.”

NIOSH, in conjunction with the NASA Tournament Lab and a crowdsourcing vendor, is asking programmers to develop an algorithm that uses AI to read the injury reports and code them according to the Occupational Injury and Illness Classification System.

“We’re thrilled to be hosting this competition along with our partners,” Carlos Siordia, lead project officer at NIOSH, said in the release. “Not only do these partnerships help support our extramural crowdsourcing AI competition, but they can also support others at [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] who want to crowdsource software programming to come up with the most innovative and efficient solutions to improve public health.”

The contest ends Nov. 21 and has a top prize of $10,000.