Abstract: First session for the competition program at NeurIPS2020.

Machine learning competitions have grown in popularity and impact over the last decade, emerging as an effective means to advance the state of the art by posing well-structured, relevant, and challenging problems to the community at large. Motivated by a reward or merely the satisfaction of seeing their machine learning algorithm reach the top of a leaderboard, practitioners innovate, improve, and tune their approach before evaluating on a held-out dataset or environment. The competition track of NeurIPS has matured in 2020, its fourth year, with a considerable increase in both the number of challenges and the diversity of domains and topics. A total of 16 competitions are featured this year as part of the track, with 8 competitions associated to each of the two days. The list of competitions that ar part of the program are available here:

https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2020/CompetitionTrack