call for challenge proposals

[Florence Dalche]

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				2nd CALL FOR CHALLENGE PROPOSALS
						of
				PASCAL european network of excellence

                (Pattern Analysis, Statistical modelling and ComputationAl Learning)
		
               		    http://www.pascal-network.org/challenge     

				DEADLINE : March 4th, 2004

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The PASCAL network of excellence invites submissions of challenge proposals
for which the PASCAL joint program of challenges will provide funding and
support to cover part of expenses.  The aim of this challenge program is to 
focus attention of the research community on difficult taks that may
require new algorithmic development. Both application challenge and theoretical 			challenges can be proposed. 
	For application challenges,the idea is to run competitions to get  no-bullshit 			head-to-head comparisons of established or new techniques on well chosen datasets. We 			expect that results will provide interesting information to a research field about 			comparative performance of different methods under controlled conditions. Canonical 			examples are the NIPS feature selection challenge (2003), the various NIST speech 			competitions. The proposed challenge can be a concrete task in the following fields of 			application of machine learning related to PASCAL: 

		Machine vision
		Speech
		Haptics
		Brain computer interface
		Natural language processing
		Information Retrieval/ Textual Information Access
		Text-mining and understanding
		Multimodal integration
		User modelling for computer human interaction
		


We also invite submisssions about theoretical questions and open
problems relevant to pattern analysis,statistical modelling and computational 				learning.In this case, evaluation rules can differ and can be stated  as a serie of 			steps to be reached.
Once a proposal will be accepted, the challenge submitter will have in charge 
the organization and the tracking of the challenge with the help and support of the 			challenge program in link with the infrastructure program.
Results will be presented at a challenge workshop organized at the end
of the challenges. The first workshop challenge will be held in November 2004 with 			others evry 6 	months.

Web site:
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A web site dedicated to the challenge submission process is now opened on
http://www.pascal-network.org/challenge. 

Submission:
==========
Authors of challenge proposals will be asked to answer the following questions :

        * Title of the proposal

        * Description of the challenge (including the major problem to be
          addressed)

        * Relevance with PASCAL

        * Expected impact on machine learning research and field of interest

	* Feasibility 

        * Description/ availability of the data

        * Time and budget required to set up the datasets and resources

        * Evaluation procedure

        * Results already obtained (established baseline)

        * Estimated number of teams interested in the participation of the
          challenge

        * Indication of short term/long term challenge


Key dates :
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DEADLINE for electronic submissions :             March 4th
Notification to the authors :                     March 12th
Reception of corrected electronic submissions
and public notification of selected proposals:  March 19th
	

Reviewing process:
=================

Each submitted challenge proposal would be reviewed by two members of the programme 			committee.
A detailed feedback will be send back to the authors. When proposals will be accepted, 			there will be a short time for adjusting it to answer the comments of the reviewers 			from March 12th to March 19th.

Preliminary programme committee:
===============================

Samy Bengio (IDIAP, Martigny)
Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp)
Cyril Goutte (Xerox, Grenoble)
Steve Gunn (University of Southampton) 
Klaus-Robert Mueller (Faunhofer,Berlin)
Michle Sebag (LRI, Orsay)
Bill Triggs (INRIA, Grenoble)
Chris Watkins (Royal Holloway university, London)
Florence d'Alch-Buc (university of Paris 6)

Any question regarding this call for challenge proposals may be addressed to
Florence d'Alch-Buc : florence.dalche at lip6.fr with PASCAL CHALLENGE in the subject.
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