[hpc-announce] Call for Machine Learning Competition Proposals

[Marcin Paprzycki]

Call for Machine Learning Competition Proposals

https://www.fedcsis.org/2020/cfc

FedCSIS at the KnowledgePit Platform

Contact/more information: contact at knowledgepit.ml

Proposal Submission Deadline: January 31, 2020


Introduction:
We invite academic, industrial, and government organizations to submit 
the proposals to organize and co-sponsor the Machine Learning 
Competition at the 15th Conference on Computer Science and Information 
Systems (FedCSIS 2020).

Machine learning competitions associated with the FedCSIS conference 
series have a long tradition. Since 2014, they have been organized every 
year at the KnowledgePit online competition platform, and in total, they 
have already attracted over 1200 teams from more than 40 countries.


Recognition:
The competition will be broadly announced by the FedCSIS 2020 organizers 
and the KnowledgePit team.

The top performing competition participants will be invited to present 
their solutions and publish the associated papers in frame of the 
Special Competition Session held at FedCSIS 2020.

The official Competition Awards Ceremony will take place during the 
FedCSIS 2020 banquet. The competition organizers will be invited to 
attend the banquet and participate in the ceremony.

The opening presentation at the special competition session will be 
prepared by the KnowledgePit team in cooperation with the competition 
organizers. The presentation will be jointly affiliated. It is also 
possible to publish the joint paper describing the competition in the 
FedCSIS 2020 conference materials.


Sponsorship:
The competition organizers are expected to sponsor the prizes for the 
winning teams. In the previous years, we had usually the 1000 USD prize 
for the winners and 500 USD prize for the second place. The declared 
prize levels should be described in the submitted competition proposal.

Please note that the FedCSIS 2020 organizers co-sponsor the Machine 
Learning Competition by providing free registrations for the top-3 
participants, and the KnowledgePit team contributes with its time and 
the ability to use the online competition platform. Therefore, this is a 
joint effort.


Those who are willing to organize a competition need to remember about 
the following:

The tasks should be challenging but achievable within the expected 
timeline of the competition.
The data sets should be novel. They cannot be available before the 
competition begins. The KnowledgePit team will assist in preparation of 
publicly available versions of the competition data sets.
The organizers will be requested to cooperate with the KnowledgePit team 
to comprehensively describe the task and data to the competition 
participants.


Organization details:
FedCSIS machine learning competitions are usually focused on learning 
classification / prediction / forecasting models based on the data sets 
which should be provided by the competition organizers.

The competition should last for several months (see the timeline below). 
The tasks should be challenging but achievable within the expected 
timeframe. Participants may use any method they choose.

The data sets cannot be available before the competition begins. The 
KnowledgePit team will assist you in preparation of publicly available 
versions of the competition data sets.

The competition organizers will be requested to cooperate with the 
KnowledgePit team in order to describe the task and the data to the 
competition participants.

The competition will be hosted at the KnowledgePit platform which 
includes automatic solution submission and evaluation systems, and 
provides a leaderboard for the participants.

The competition winners will be selected based on their final rankings, 
as well as short reports describing their algorithms and results. As 
already mentioned, the authors of the most successful and interesting 
solutions will be invited to submit a paper to the special session and 
attend FedCSIS 2020.


Competition timeline:
Step 1 - Submissions of the competition proposals: January 31, 2020
Step 2 - Proposal evaluation and acceptance decisions: February 7, 2020
Step 3 - Data release, the start of the competition: February 28, 2020
Step 4 - Deadline for the competition participants to submit final 
solutions: May 29, 2020
Step 5 - Publication of final results and paper submission invitations: 
June 5, 2020
Step 6 - Deadline for invited participants to submit their special 
session papers: June 9, 2020
Step 7 - Author notification: June 30, 2020
Step 8 - Final paper submission and registration (free for competition 
winners): July 15, 2020


Competition topics:
We will consider the topics from (but not limited to) the following 
application domains:

Mobility
Health and wellness
Finance
Advanced manufacturing
Predictive maintenance
Retail and e-commerce
Gaming industry
Cybersecurity
Smart city and community


Competition proposals:
Please send the proposals to: contact at knowledgepit.ml

Remember about the submission deadline: January 31, 2020.

The proposals will be evaluated based on the significance and novelty of 
the considered problem, clarity of its specification, and availability 
of the related data.

The proposals should answer to the following questions:

Who are the Competition Organizers? Provide names, affiliations, contact 
information, brief bios.
Which sector / application domain is considered in the proposed machine 
learning competition?
What is the considered task? Which evaluation metrics are proposed to 
evaluate the solutions?
(If you are not sure about the appropriate choice of the evaluation 
metrics, such as accuracy, F1-score etc., the KnowledgePit team is ready 
to assist you.)
What kind of data set will be provided? Please describe its essential 
characteristics.
(If there are privacy concerns regarding the data, please explain in 
detail. The KnowledgePit team may provide additional services regarding 
the data anonymization. Please contact us for more information.)
What prizes will be offered to the winners?
(As already mentioned, it is expected that the competition organizers 
will sponsor the prizes at the level of at least 1000 USD for the 
winners and 500 USD for the second place.)


Intellectual property:
It is the standard that Intellectual Property associated with the 
solutions submitted by the competition winners will be owned by the 
competition organizers who sponsored the prizes. For more details, 
please contact us at: contact at knowledgepit.ml

Competition co-chairs:
Piotr Biczyk, QED Software
Andrzej Janusz, University of Warsaw