One in 50 American children have autism, according to the latest figures released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March. One of the winners of the YarcData Graph Analytics Challenge, announced in April, can make a difference in better understanding the causes of the disease.

Taking second place in the competition, the work of Adam Lugowski, Dr. John Gilbert, and Kevin Dewesse, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, leveraged a dataset created for the Mayo Clinic Smackdown project, that has the same structure and property types – and scale – as the medical organization’s actual Big Data sets around autism, but which uses publicly available data in place of the real thing. The team can’t use the real data because it includes private information about patients, diagnosis, prescriptions, and the like.

But the actual data deployed for the project doesn’t matter, says Lugowski . “The goal is to find relationships we have never thought of before, and this way it doesn’t prejudice the algorithm,” he says. Using YarcData’s uRIKA graph analytics appliance, the algorithm queries the Smackdown dataset – which in its smallest version has almost 40 million RDF triples and in its largest is about 100 times bigger, mirroring the size of all the Mayo Clinic’s actual autism data – to discover commonalities among the data, mimicking how the real data sets could be queried in search of common precursors among clusters of patients with the diagnosis.

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YarcData LLC, a Cray company dedicated to providing “Big Data” graph-analytic solutions to enterprises, today announced the winners of the YarcData Graph Analytics Challenge showcasing the increasing applicability and adoption of graph analytics in discovering unknown relationships in Big Data. Submissions included an innovative range of applications across a broad variety of sectors including crime prediction, social science, life science and sports performance. Read more

YarcData has announced the finalists of the company’s Graph Analytics Challenge: “The top six entries for the contest, which features $100,000 in prizes including a $70,000 grand prize for the first place winner, were determined to have entered the best submissions for un-partitionable, Big Data graph problems. The top six submissions span a number of diverse categories, such as healthcare, law enforcement, sports, life sciences and social media.” Read more

Early in 2011, I wrote a piece here on SemanticWeb.com which explored the relationship between Semantic Technologies and super-computing’s venerable rock star, Cray. Then, earlier this year, Cray spun out a new division to focus upon exploring massive graph databases; something which should resonate with the semantic technology community. The new division — YarcData — differentiates itself quite clearly from its parent, leading with a data-led proposition and typically operating at quite a different pricepoint to its eye-wateringly expensive parent.

I sat down with YarcData President Arvind Parthasarathi during the Semantic Technology & Business Conference in San Francisco, to get an update on YarcData and to hear why the company is investing $100,000 in prizes for a new ‘Big Data Graph Analytics Challenge.’ Read more