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Looking for innovative ways to use R, the Big Data open source analytics language? Then take a gander at the two top winners of the first of a series of contests that R's corporate caretaker Revolution Analytics has produced. The winners, announced today, receive prizes that range from $1,000 to $10,000 for their submissions. It is an interesting collection and shows off the power of the language itself.

In addition to the official Kinect Accelerator program we wrote about last month, data crowdsourcing contest site Kaggle today announced a new challenge around Kinect as well.

Kaggle hosts cash prize competitions for people to play with data and come up with various solutions. The contests are calls for hacks that jailbreak fundamental models professionals currently use to monitor finances, write code to analyze shopping behavior, improve space exploration, and a wide variety of other topics.

Their latest is the Gesture Recognition Challenge. It is organized by CHALEARN and is sponsored in part by Microsoft. The object of this contest is to produce an improved gesture algorithm that will analyze a series of Kinect video streams. Samples of actual Kinect video clips are supplied, similar to other Kaggle contests that are used to develop other algorithms.

In news that will no doubt make our Pittsburgh-based COO Sean Ammirati swell with local pride, the Carnegie Mellon University team D1W (couldn't they think of a less geeky name) took the $10,000 first place prize in this week's Yahoo Open Hack All Stars contest. (The team is pictured at left.) In 24 hours, the team produced a prototype file-sharing collaboration tool called Ruum.

The contest, held in New York City, brought back nearly 40 previous winners of earlier hack challenges. In addition to the cash, the winning team might also get a chance to receive more mentoring from Yahoo developers and possible office space and technical support too.

If you think our middle school science and math education is below par, now is your chance to do something about it. Today the magazine Popular Science joined forces with InnoCentive to announce a new competition to come up with a series of new curricula around a series of topics. Each winner will receive a purse of $5,000. Lesson plans need to include a hands on activity for students and should cost no more than $50 total in readily available materials per class.

If you fancy yourself a law enforcement computer forensics examiner, then you might want to sign up for this year's Defense Department DC3 Challenge. There is no prize purse for winning, other than bragging rights and free passes to various computer security conferences, but it represents a unique public hacking challenge that has been going on for several years now. You have between now and the end of October to get your submission ready, and it will take a significant amount of effort to prepare your entry, just so you know.

Today at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced a contest to produce advanced security technology to protect Windows computers. The grand prize for the Microsoft Blue Hat Prize is $200,000. $50,000 will go to the runner-up and an MSDN Universal subscription (worth about $10,000) to the third place winner. Microsoft is taking a step above the "bug bounty" program offered by Google, Mozilla and Facebook and incentivizing developers to not just patch holes in Windows, but to put security technology ahead of the curve of the constant threat of attacks.

Microsoft will be accepting submissions until April 1, 2012 and the contest will be judged by Microsoft engineers. A winner will be announced at next year's Black Hat conference. The goal of the contest is to get developers to focus more on the big picture as opposed to individual bugs or issues. Is the lure $200,000 enough for developers throw themselves head first into Microsoft's challenge?

Amazon announced today its fifth annual Amazon Web Services Start-up Challenge for entrepreneurs using AWS. This year the contest has been expanded globally and will reward 15 regional semifinalists, five each from the Americas, Asia Pacific and Europe/Middle East/Africa. This time Amazon has teamed with YouNoodle.com, a global entrepreneurship network and contest platform to help administer the contest. Past finalists of the AWS Start-up Challenge include Justin.tv (in 2007), cloud-computing email productivity service Sonian Corp. (2008) and Yieldex.

AWS and other cloud providers like RackSpace have been pivotal in the next-generation explosion of web and mobile applications that have changed the dynamic of the current era of technology disruption. Amazon's ease-of-use and elastic pricing model has lowered the bar for startups looking to experiment with their products and scale quickly. By opening the contest to a worldwide audience this year, Amazon has set its sights not just on the Silicon Valley crowd but also on disruptive developer hotbeds across the globe.

Box announced the Box Mobile Dev Challenge for Android, iOS and webOS developers. The best enterprise apps with Box integration can win prizes including up to $25,000 cash, InMobi ad network credits and the chance to pitch your your idea to the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

I will be part of the panel of judges, along with other tech bloggers and representatives from the contest's sponsors.

Who's building the hottest news media technologies in the world? Every year, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation takes on the challenge of judging from hundreds of entrants in the Knight News Challenge and selecting a small number of them to fund with up to $5 million in total backing.

This year, 16 winners from 4 countries were selected, and they are very consistent with cutting edge trends in the tech industry at large. They range from government accountability tracking systems to a tool that sends an SMS to people in water deprived areas when water is available. John S. Bracken runs the Foundation's grant-making in digital media and wrote today on the Knight blog that this year's winners seemed to touch on three common themes: the rise of the hacker/data journalist, a broad interpretation of "news" and the need to make better sense of the stream.

Online notes platform Evernote has been growing rapidly over the past year and is putting some of its venture funding to good use: A developer app-building contest with $100,000 worth of prizes.

Evernote has raised around $45 million with its latest round a Series C $20 million injection in October 2010 from Sequoia Capital. Developers can use the Evernote API to build extensions or features onto the platform with the grand prize winner taking home $50,000. Evernote developers and users: what do you want to see built onto the platform?