NIPS 2018 Call for Competitions
We invite proposals for the Neural Information Processing Systems 2018 (NIPS 2018) competition track to be held in Vancouver, Canada. After the success of the past two years, a third edition of the competition track will be held at NIPS 2018. We solicit competition proposals on any topic of interest to the NeurIPS community. We especially encourage competition proposals from emerging new fields or new application domains related to NeurIPS. Interdisciplinary topics that will attract a significant cross-section of the community are especially highly encouraged.
As in previous years, there will be two types of competitions:
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Standard data science competitions, where participants will compete to obtain the best score on a machine learning task of interest to the NeurIPS community based on a problem and data defined and released by the organizers of the competition.
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Live competitions, which will be held in a “science-fair” manner at NeurIPS 2019. Participants will present live demos at NeurIPS 2019 which apply methodology to an application domain defined by the organizers of the live competition.
There will be a competition track at NeurIPS 2019, co-located with the conference workshops, where competition results will be presented and discussed. Competition organizers will asked to propose a tentative schedule for presentation of the competition and its results during an assigned time slot; NeurIPS will provide coffee breaks and, if necessary, poster facilities. Competition organizers and participants will be invited to contribute a book chapter the upcoming NeurIPS 2019 Competition Volume of the Springer Series on Challenges in Machine Learning (pending acceptance).
For any additional questions please contact the NeurIPS 2019 competition chair.
PROPOSAL SUBMISSION
Standard data science and live competition proposals must both be submitted via CMT at: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/COMPNEURLPS2019
Please carefully follow the provided Latex template when preparing proposals.
REVIEWING AND SELECTION PROCESS
A competition program committee will be formed, consisting of experts on both machine learning and on challenge organization. Each proposal will be reviewed by at least three members of the committee. The factors that will be considered when evaluating proposals include:
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Task chosen: Impact, originality, relevance to the NeurIPS community will all be considered. Tasks that include humanitarian and/or positive societal impact are especially highly encouraged this year, although other topics relevant to the NeurIPS community will also be considered. If humanitarian projects are submitted, the involvement of the community in question is strongly desired, and “parachute science” is strongly discouraged.
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Protocol of competition: Feasibility of the task chosen, soundness of the evaluation criteria, and clarity and fairness of the competition rules will all be considered.
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Logistics: Schedule, plan for attracting competition participants, and experience and diversity of the organizers will all be considered. The specific plan for attracting participants of groups under-represented at NeurIPS will be considered.
IMPORTANT DATES
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Competition proposal submission deadline: March 8, 2019
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Acceptance notification: March 23, 2019
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Competition track: December, 2019
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS
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Competition organizers should propose a timeline for running the competition to ensure that participants have enough time to contribute a high-quality entries. It is recommended that competitions be completed by end of October, 2019 at the absolute latest.
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Competition organizers that require help or suggestions regarding competition platforms for running the competition can contact the competition chair for advice.
COMPETITION CHAIR
Hugo Jair Escalante, INAOE, ChaLearn, hugo.jair@gmail.com