CoIL Competition Challenge 2000: Present your results in Greece

[Peter van der Putten]

Provide the best solution in the CoIL Challenge 2000 before May 4 and get
free registration and travel support for the CoIL'2000 Symposium on June
19-23 in Chios, Greece!

Direct mailings to a company's potential customers - "junk mail" to many -
can be a very effective way for them to market a product or a service.
However, as we all know, much of this junk mail is really of no interest to
the majority of the people that receive it. Most of it ends up thrown away,
not only wasting the money that the company spent on it, but also filling up
landfill waste sites or needing to be recycled.

If the company had a better understanding of who their potential customers
were, they would know more accurately who to send it to, so some of this
waste and expense could be reduced. Therefore, following a successful CoIL
competition last year (See Synergy Issue 1, Winter 1999), CoIL has just
announced a new competition challenge for 2000:

"Can you predict who would be interested in buying a caravan insurance
policy and give an explanation why?"

This competition is organized by COiL, the Computational Intelligence and
Learning Cluster. The goal of CoIL is to achieve scientific, technical and
"social" integration of four european communities that perform research,
development and application: Erudit (Fuzzy logic), EvoNet (Evolutionary
computing), MLNet (Machine learning) and NEuroNet (Neural networks). The
data was supplied by the Dutch datamining company Sentient Machine Research.

We encourage any type of solutions to these problems, particularly those
involving any of the CoIL technologies or any combinations of these. We are
also interested in other solutions using other technologies, since CoIL is
interested in being able to demonstrate how CoIL technologies relate to
other techniques.

The winners will be invited to present a short paper on their approach at
the CoIL'2000 Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Learning (19-23
June 2000), in Chios, Greece. Your participation will be free of charge and
we will pay you a travel support of 750 Euro.

Important dates:
17 March 2000 Release of data 
4 May 2000 Deadline for submissions 
12 May 2000 Announcement of winners 
22-23 June 2000 CoIL'2000 Symposium 

For more information, please visit CoILWeb:
http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/coil/.

Best wishes,

Peter van der Putten
Consultant Sentient Machine Research