NIPS 2017 Call for Competitions

We invite competition proposals for the 2017 Neural Information Processing Systems 2017 conference (NIPS 2017: https://nips.cc/Conferences/2017) in Long Beach, CA. NIPS has had traditionally a demonstration track with competition for best demo (also available for NIPS 2017). The call for competitions corresponds to a completely new NIPS track/special session.

We solicit competition proposals on any topic of interests to the NIPS community. We especially encourage competition proposals that are stemmed from emerging new fields or new application domains related to NIPS. Interdisciplinary topics that could attract a significant cross- section of the community are highly valued.

There will be two kinds of competitions:

• Standard data science driven competitions, where participants will compete to obtain the best score on a machine learning problem of interest to the NIPS community based on a problem and data defined and released by the organizers of the competition.
• Live competitions, which will be held in a science-fair manner at NIPS: Participants will present demos at NIPS which apply NIPS methodology in a particular application domain defined by the organizers of the Live competition.

There will be time slots during NIPS or the workshops where competition results can be discussed and presented. Organizers will propose a tentative schedule for the presentation of the competition and its results based on the assigned time slot. The main conference will provide coffee breaks and, if necessary, poster facilities. For any additional questions please contact the competition chairs.

Both competition organizers and participants will be invited to contribute with a book chapter for inclusion in the upcoming NIPS 2017 Competition book, within the Springer Series on Challenges in Machine Learning (confirmed).

DATA SCIENCE COMPETITION PROPOSAL SUBMISSION

Regular data science driven competition proposals must be sent to the competition chairs, with email subject "NIPS17 Competition Proposal: [title of your competition]". Please carefully follow the available CompNIPS2017 template to apply for the competition.

Live COMPETITION PROPOSAL SUBMISSION

Live competition proposals must be sent to the competition chairs, with email subject "NIPS17 Live Competition Proposal: [title of your competition]". Please follow the available LiveNIPS2017 template to apply for the Live competition. A very important requirement for the Live competition acceptance is the plan for recruiting participants.

Schedule

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS TO COMPETITION PROPOSERS

• In case your proposal contains a “regular data science” track and a “Live” track, please submit both available templates for revision. It may happen that only one of them is accepted.

• Competition organizers should propose a timeline for running the competition to ensure participants to have enough time to contribute with a high quality solution. It is recommended the whole competition to be finished as late by the end of October, 2017.

• Proposers with a competition proposal that may require help/suggestions regarding the competition platform to run the competition can contact the competition chairs for advice.

COMPETITION CHAIRS

Dr. Sergio Escalera, sergio.escalera.guerrero@gmail.com
Dr. Markus Weimer, markus@weimo.de