From October 2019 to July 2026, ThinkOnward ran 33 open data science challenges on hard problems from the energy industry, most of them in the subsurface. Teams joined 6,181 times, 886 people posted a scored entry, and ThinkOnward paid $809,000 in prizes to community members.

The program bet that people from outside oil and gas could solve problems the industry was stuck on. They did. A medical student and a hospital machine learning engineer mapped seismic layers the way medicine segments MRI and CT scans. A machine learning engineer at a video-streaming platform saw a well's pressure as a video player's buffer. An undergraduate in Nigeria beat a field of industry data scientists. In Slick in a Haystack, the community raised the precision of a model that finds oil slicks in satellite images from 11% to 89%, cut the cost of each scene from about $60 to under $1, and saw its method in production eight weeks later.

This report tells the story of the program, from a first challenge on a platform wired together by hand to a last challenge that accepted agent submissions. It is also a thank-you. To the 886 solvers, and the thousands of members who came to learn: you showed that people with a fresh angle could solve problems experts had been stuck on.

To the customers and sponsors who trusted the community with their hardest problems and their data: you made every challenge possible. To the team that built and ran the program, from the data and the scoring to the glossy photo and the punny name:

Rodrigo Assar, Mike Campbell, Chad Crawford, Ashkan Hosseinloo, Karol Kawalerczyk, Wenwen Kong, Nataliia Manakova, Mike McIntire, Jakub Mizera, Bao Nguyen, Vitalii Panchyk, Jesse Pisel, Kenton Prindle, Jeff Roth, Matthew Schultz, Yaroslav Sihetii, Nate Suurmeyer, Ognjen Tanovic, and Ashley Yanner. Thanks also to the broader teams at ThinkOnward and SoftServe who supported the program.

Though ThinkOnward will no longer hosts stand-alone challenges, it will always look to both AI and the community to help shape the best solutions for its customers.