There are a couple of Kaggle contests that I call your attention to, now that I have been convinced contests are fun, not tacky: Whale Detection Challenge and
Predicting Parkinson’s Disease Progression. The are both the kind of thing that someone might call “Big Data”, but in two different dimensions.
The whales have 23 teams entered at the time of writing, while PD has zero. I bet that is because there is a way to score interim results on whale detection, but the PD contest is judged based on a 5 page report.
Healthy Algorithms 