Impacting the World with Data & AI: Announcing the Finalists for the 2022 Databricks Data Team for Good Award

The annual Databricks Data Team Awards recognize data teams who are harnessing the power of data and AI to deliver solutions for some of the world's toughest problems.

Nearly 250 teams were nominated across six categories from all industries, regions, and companies - all with impressive stories about the work they are doing with data and AI. As we lead up to Data and AI Summit, we will be showcasing the finalists in each of the categories over the coming days.

The Data Team for Good Award salutes the data teams who are making a positive impact in the world, delivering solutions for global challenges — from healthcare to sustainability.

Meet the five finalists for the Data Team for Good Award category:

Cognoa
Cognoa’s mission is to enable earlier and more equitable access to care and improve the lives and outcomes of children living with behavioral health conditions. Research demonstrates that the sooner a diagnosis is made and interventions can begin, the more positive outcome can be achieved in a child’s life. To that end, Cognoa has developed the first FDA-authorized diagnosis aid, Canvas Dx, to help physicians diagnose or rule out autism in children as early as age 18 months through to 72 months. Powered by data and AI, the Software as a Medical Device leverages the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to tap into the power of AI and ML to help clinicians uncover the relationships between thousands of data points gathered from multiple video recordings, a questionnaire completed by the caregiver and by the physician - all to identify non-obvious patterns that point towards or away from autism. The result is an accurate and data-driven tool that empowers primary care providers to more efficiently diagnose or rule out autism in young children, enabling connection of children and families to appropriate therapy and supportive resources.

Karius
Karius has developed a liquid biopsy test for infectious diseases, using innovations across chemistry, data, and AI, to non-invasively detect over 1,000 pathogens from a single blood sample. The Karius Test, offered to hundreds of hospitals across the country, can help decrease the time and effort it takes clinicians to accurately diagnose an infection, without the need for an invasive diagnostic procedure or the application of slower, less-effective methods like a blood culture. To go beyond the diagnosis of an infection in a single patient, Karius is leveraging Databricks Lakehouse to unlock the promise of a new data type — microbial cell-free DNA — with AI to“see” patterns across infections, expanding from a few pathogens to the wider microbial landscape. The new capability allows Karius to identify novel biomarkers connecting microbes to opportunities across human health and disease. Furthermore, the organization has super-charged its biomarker discovery platform by developing a de-identified clinicogenomics database, which connects Karius molecular data to clinical data, empowering scientists, and physicians, to better interpret the patterns. Karius is now looking to apply its new data and AI capabilities beyond infectious disease, including opportunities across oncology, autoimmune disease, and response to therapy.

National Heavy Vehicle Regulator
The National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR), is on a mission to lower driver fatalities on Australian roads by mitigating risks associated with driver fatigue. NHVR leverages Databricks to use data and AI to provide preventative incident monitoring and insights from crash prediction models that helps save lives. With Databricks Lakehouse, they are able to capture and analyze high volumes of data, such as 4.5 million monthly vehicle sightings from around the country, in real-time to identify patterns that help predict risks and administer timely and effective intervention across a fleet of almost 1 million heavy commercial vehicles. NHVR is able to send real-time alerts to safety and compliance officers in the field to intercept vehicles potentially posing a danger to public safety. Among the many insights they gather and action on are the weight of a vehicle, travel times, the frequency and duration of driver breaks, all contributing to more effective regulation. In addition, the data team has enabled NHVR to create a more reliable crash prediction model by leveraging AI to identify vehicles and operators that have a higher probability of being involved in a fatal or serious incident.

Regeneron Genetics Center
The Regeneron Genetics Center (RGC) is on a mission to tap into the power of genomic data to bring new medicines to patients in need. But genomic and clinical data is highly decentralized and both difficult and costly to scale, which is why the RGC data team turned to the Databricks Lakehouse to help it scale its data systems from supporting thousands of patient participants to millions over only a few years. On top of Databricks Lakehouse, RGC has built one of the largest genomics databases in the world, and the ability to derive faster insights from this data has led to important discoveries in cardiovascular disease, obesity, immunology, oncology, COVID-19, and much more. The RGC has contributed to Glow, an open-source data toolkit that enables scaling genomic analyses to millions of samples contributed by research organizations across the world, resulting in new findings like determining genetic susceptibility to COVID-19.

US DoD Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Office, Advana Program
Advana (a mash-up of the words “Advancing Analytics”) is a division of the US Department of Defense (DoD) that supports multiple missions --from defending the US soil, to foreign aggression, to climate change, to protecting global citizens from the risks of the COVID-19 pandemic. They are leveraging Databricks Lakehouse to ethically provide a unified view of all their data and deliver actionable insights from the boardroom to the battlefield for those moment-to-moment responses that decision-makers need. Today, Advana offers more than 250 applications in production drawing from more than 390 data sources. The Lakehouse provides them with the right-time data, data tools, AI and ML enablers, and other self-service products to put the power of data in the hands of more than 30,000 users, across many organizations. For instance, Advana continues to expand its COVID-19 analytic capabilities to help the DoD actively manage its ongoing response. They launched new functionality around HPCON tracking, travel and installation support, COVID cases, PPEs, and data which informed school opening decisions and vaccine dose administrations. Disclaimer: receipt of this award does not constitute a DoD endorsement of Databricks, Booz Allen, or any other non-Federal entity.

Check out the award finalists in the other five categories and come raise a glass and celebrate these amazing data teams during an award ceremony at the Data and AI Summit on June 29.