Connectionists: MASH Factory Contest

[Francois Fleuret]

Dear colleagues,

We are announcing a new contest in the fields of Machine Learning and
Artificial Intelligence. The contest is aimed at all C++ programmers
and does not require specific knowledge of either Machine Learning or
Artificial Intelligence techniques in general.

Prizes: to win are 3 NEXUS 7 Android Tablet (32Gb, 3G) ( + mugs, T-Shirts...)

Site: http://www.mash-project.eu/wiki/index.php/Factory_Contest

End of contest: June 7, 2013

Short description (please consult the site's FAQ for more details):
Contestants participate by submitting *short* C++ snippets that are
evaluated immediately on the site. The snippets, which we call
"heuristics", should be designed to help a robot navigate a simulated
3D environment and solve a series of tasks (e.g. "Reach a red flag in
a rectangular room"). A heuristic is simply a function taking as input
the image corresponding to the robot's field of view, and returning
values ("features"). The performance of a heuristic, or of a group of
heuristics, is assessed via a separate learning algorithm trying to
mimic a teacher for the tasks while using the information provided by
the features.

Note: Participants retain all legal rights on the submitted code
snippets, but authorize their use for academic publication directly
related to the contest and including proper credit attribution of the
snippet's author.

The MASH project is funded by the Information and Communication
Technologies division of the European Commission, Cognitive Systems
and Robotics unit, under the 7th Research Framework Program. The
project VELASH on object detection is funded by the Swiss
National Science Foundation.

Best,

-- 
Francois Fleuret                         http://www.idiap.ch/~fleuret/