The Expanded program provides hackathons, schools & non-profits free access to hundreds of clean, rich and current data sets. ThreatSync, a global cyber threat-sharing platform, wins 2017 HopHacks by leveraging the cyber threat intelligence feeds.
Lewes, Delaware – March 15, 2017 – John Snow Labs has announced an expansion of its data philanthropy program, that provides free access to hundreds of expert curated datasets in healthcare, life science and cyber security. The company is actively helping several hackathons, schools and non-profits, and given the strong demand and positive feedback so far has decided to make it available to a broader audience.
John Snow Labs also publicly joined the 1% Pledge Corporate Philanthropy initiative.
“We believe strongly in the idea that for-profit corporation can and must be a driver for good in our world, and leading the Data Philanthropy movement is the most natural way for us to pitch in,” said the founding team.
Data science is a major driver of human progress in the 21st century. Among the ecosystem of technology companies, healthcare providers, research, government and non-profit organizations working to make this a reality, there is a gap in providing quality Data Operations: Finding, cleaning, formatting, updating and publishing turnkey data for analysis. Data scientists, engineers and curators at John Snow Labs are working to solve these problems at scale.
The HopHacks Hackathon – where creativity meets Big Data
John Snow Labs recently sponsored the semiannual HopHacks 2017 hackathon, which attracted more than 320 students from across the USA.
The HopHacks team said about their partnership with John Snow Labs:
“We would like to thank you for your support throughout HopHacks Spring 2017. Your hard work and contribution have been extremely valuable to this event. Thanks to you, so many amazing projects were brought to life this past weekend”.
Jason Yim, HopHacks Organizer: “Overall many people told me the datasets were great and very easy to use, perfect for hackathon setting. We would love to continue partnering with you for future events!”
ThreatSync – A Global Threat Sharing Platform and HopHacks 2017 Winner
The aim of the ThreatSync project is to create a global and real-time threat-sharing platform. It’s a distributed, decentralized, and real-time threat sharing system using blockchain. Out of the box, it provides a rich, validated and always up to date set of current threat intelligence feeds, from John Snow Labs’ cyber data catalog.
The idea for ThreatSync came when Benjamin Leibowitz, Andrew Fan and Eric Rothman realized the value in the strength of the cyber threat intelligence data while browsing through the John Snow Labs datasets provided during the HopHacks 2017.
“We decided to use blockchain as the primary data store because its decentralized nature removed the need for a central authority to manage and maintain knowledge. Also, its real-time nature allows information to be shared across organizations in the fast-moving cyber security world. For proof of concept, we used 2 nodes on Amazon Web Services running the open-source blockchain software, MultiChain,” says the team. “In addition, we built a Python SDK to allow developers to automate accessing, updating, and acting on intelligence.”
Benjamin Leibowitz said: “We really liked working with the Johns Snow Labs data, and thanks for sponsoring the hackathon! All the teams had a blast and there were some really interesting projects working on the data. It was really helpful to be able to use your data to bootstrap our system and provide proof of concept that this is an idea with real potential.”
Eric Rothman added: “The datasets were really clean, easy to access and easy to use. There was such a large variety of data, at the start my team didn’t even know where to begin. It was a joy to be able to use the data provided.”
Not only was there a breadth of malicious cybersecurity threat information, but also the data was also clean enough to allow them to bootstrap their application with zero modification to the data itself. So they decided to build a platform to allow companies to share cyber security threats amongst themselves.
The 1% Pledge Movement of Corporate Philanthropy
Pledge 1% is a Corporate Philanthropy movement dedicated to making the community a key stakeholder in every business. Pledge 1% encourages and challenges individuals and companies to pledge 1% of equity, product, or employee time for their communities.
The John Snow Labs team believes every company must have a social mission that prioritizes making a positive impact on the world. The company has pledged to donate 1% of its product every year to social projects and causes that align with its mission.
The team emphasized that “Taking the 1% pledge is more than a show of philanthropic intent. It holds us publicly accountable for our mission. Our data philanthropy journey began in the very first weeks of the company’s existence, and we are delighted to grow it into a scalable and well received program. We intend to keep raising the bar and do more for the benefit of the entire ecosystem.”
For further information, visit: www.JohnSnowLabs.com
