The Kaggle data science community is competing to improve airport security with AI

Going through airport security is a universally painful experience. And despite being slow and invasive, the TSA doesn’t have a great record at catching threats. With the help of the Kaggle data science community, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is hosting an online competition to build machine learning-powered tools that can augment agents, ideally making the entire system simultaneously more accurate and efficient.

Kaggle, acquired by Google earlier this year, regularly hosts online competitions where data scientists compete for money by developing novel approaches to complex machine learning problems. Today’s competition to improve threat recognition algorithms will be Kaggle’s third launch this year featuring more than a million dollars in prize money.

With a top prize of $500,000 and a total of $1.5 million at stake, competitors will have to accurately predict the location of threat objects on the body. The TSA is making its data set of images available to competitors so they can train on images of people carrying weapons. Importantly, these will be staged images created by the TSA rather than real-world examples — a necessary move to ensure privacy.