CoIL Competition [neural nets and machine learning -- Ed.]

[Mark Plumbley]

Is your water safe?

There is increased concern at the impact man is having on the environment.
In temperate climates, summer algae growth can result in poor water
clarity, mass deaths of river fish and the closure of recreational water
facilities. To understand this problem, there is a need to identify the
crucial chemical control variables for the biological processes. This is
the subject of the first Computational Intelligence and Learning (CoIL)
competition.

CoIL is an EC-funded Cluster of Networks of Excellence (NoEs), formed in
Jan 1999 as a collaboration between ERUDIT, EvoNet, MLNET and NEuroNet, 
representing Fuzzy Logic, Evolutionary Computing, Machine Learning, and
Neural Computing respectively. While the techniques and paradigms of
interest to these networks are largely distinct (and sometimes
complementary), these various techniques can often be used to tackle
similar problems or be used together on the same problem.

This CoIL competition has been organised through ERUDIT, and is open to all
interested parties. ERUDIT has had very successful competitions itself in
1996 and 1998, and the results of these illustrated how a variety of
different techniques can be used to tackle any problem.

Water quality samples were taken from sites on different European rivers of
a period of approximately one year.  These samples were analysed for
various chemical substances, and algae samples were collected to determine
the algae population distributions. While the chemical analysis is cheap
and easily automated, the biological part involves microscopic examination,
requires trained manpower and is therefore both expensive and slow.

The task of the CoIL competition is to predict the algae frequency
distributions on the basis of  the measured concentrations of the chemical
substances and some global information about the season when the sample was
taken, the river size and the fluid velocity. The data is a mixture of
qualitative and numeric variables, and some of the data is incomplete.

The detailed problem description and the data is available from
http://www.erudit.de/erudit/committe/fc-ttc/ic-99/index.htm or by ftp from:
FTP Server: ftp.mitgmbh.de
Username:   anonymous
Password:   <your email address>
Filename:   /pub/problem.zip

In case of difficulty obtaining the data, contact:
ERUDIT Service Center, c/o ELITE Foundation, Promenade 9, 52076 Aachen,
Germany. Phone: +49 2408 6969, Fax +49240894582, email: sh at mitgmbh.de

A board of referees will declare a winner and a runner-up. The winners will
be invited, free of charge, to attend the EUFIT’99 conference to present
their solutions during a special session on September 14, 1999 in Aachen,
Germany.

Important dates:
Apr 15, 1999: Data available
May 31, 1999: Deadline for submission of solutions
Jul 31, 1999: Announcement of results
Sep 14, 1999: Award of winners at the EUFIT '99 conference in Aachen
Sep 14, 1999: Presentation of the best solutions

For general CoIL information, see http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/coil/

##### STOP PRESS ###### KING'S HAS NEW PHONE AND FAX NUMBERS #####
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Dr Mark Plumbley            mark.plumbley at kcl.ac.uk    |_/ I N G'S
Centre for Neural Networks                             | \ College
Department of Electronic Engineering                   L O N D O N
King's College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK    Founded1829
Tel: +44 (0)171 848 2241,  Fax: +44 (0)171 848 2932
World Wide Web URL:   http://www.eee.kcl.ac.uk/~mdp
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