Data geeks all over the world are coming together this weekend for the closest thing to Mission: Impossible in the world of open innovation and predictive modeling. The first ever global data science "hack-a-thon" starts Saturday and runs for 24 hours, with participating data scientists worldwide taking on a specific challenge – to improve the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Index by coming up with better and more accurate predictive models of metropolitan air pollution.

The idea is to use the best models to help create regional early warning pollution systems that can given hourly alerts to sufferers of asthma and other respiratory ailments when pollution levels are likely to become dangerously high.

Data Science London and Data Science Global are hosting the event, while the competition itself will be organized by Kaggle. The US EPA will be providing its own data for the challenge.

Participants of the Data Science Global competition will be able to compete remotely or by attending any of the local venues. This will involve host cities from five participating countries, including London, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Melbourne, Canberra, Berlin and Turku, Finland.  The data scientists will compete with each other for cash prizes using a large dataset provided by the Cook County (Chicago) local government, in Illinois, to create the best predictive model.

“This is a great opportunity to bring together the best data science minds in the world and see what they can achieve in just 24 hours,” said Jeremy Howard, President and Chief Scientist of Kaggle. "Also it will be the first Kaggle competition to be held at venues so it should be quite a social event. For the first time participants will actually have a chance to meet each other."

Amazon AWS will provide free access to AWS cloud computing services to all the participants in the competition. Hundreds of competitors are expected to take part. The hack-a-thon event is part of Big Data Week, an international event taking place with over 50 meetups in a handful of countries, including those hosting the hack-a-thon.