Connectionists: Win 6 prizes in the ALvsPK challenge

[Isabelle Guyon]

IJCNN 2007 Agnostic Learning vs. Prior Knowledge challenge

The ALvsPK challenge(http://www.agnostic.inf.ethz.ch/) is prolonged 
until August 1st, 2007. The participants may win one of 6 prizes: best 
overall entry in the "agnostic learning track" and best entry for each 
dataset in the "prior knowledge track". Initial results 
(http://clopinet.com/isabelle/Projects/agnostic/ALPK-Results-Mar-07.ppt) 
indicate that you can get better results by building your domain 
knowledge into your preprocessing or your prediction algorithm, than if 
you use provided features and a generic learning machine. But is this 
really true? Try to compete in your own domain of expertise: marketing, 
handwriting recognition, drug discovery/QSAR, text classification, ecology.