Connectionists: Call for Proposals: WSDM 2016 Cup

[Jennifer Neville]

Hi--

Can you forward this CFP to the connectionists list?

Thanks,
—Jen Neville

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WSDM 2016: Ninth ACM International Conference on Web Search 
and Data Mining, San Francisco Bay Area, February 2016

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: WSDM Cup

(Proposal deadline: Apr 17, 2015; Notification: mid May, 2105)
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We invite proposals for a WSDM 2016 data mining competition. The WSDM-
2016 conference will be held in the Bay Area in late February 2016. To 
align with the goals of WSDM, we encourage proposals to include both a 
search task and a prediction/mining task.

The format of the competition will involve publishing one or more
datasets for search/mining tasks and having WSDM participants develop
algorithms to solve the task(s) and then submit their results for
evaluation. Preference will be given to proposals that involve data of
general interest, and with data/tasks that are available by July 2015. 
A good competition task is one that is scientifically or technically
challenging, can be done without extensive application domain knowledge,
and can be evaluated objectively.

The winners of the competition should be notified by end of November.
The winners will be announced in the WSDM­2016 conference, with an
invited conference talk for the winners to present their solutions.
There will also be a workshop for all participants to present and
discuss their approaches. The workshop, and competition more broadly,
will be jointly co-chaired by the proposing team and a WSDM organizer
(TBD).

The proposal description should include a short paragraph for each
proposed task covering the following items: 
-- Description of the search/mining task(s), with general background 
information on the application domain. 
-- Description of the available data, guarantee of availability, 
guarantee of confidentiality of the "ground truth" that will be used for 
evaluation, and size. 
-- Description of the evaluation procedures and established baselines. 
The evaluation metrics should be both meaningful for the application and 
statistically sound for objective performance comparison. 
-- Description of logistics of how data will be published and how 
evaluation will be conducted (e.g., via Kaggle). 
-- Names, affiliations, postal addresses, phone numbers, and short 
biographies of the organizers.

Please send your proposals to Filip.Radlinski at microsoft.com by 17 April
2015. Notification will be sent mid May. 

WSDM 2016 PC Chairs 
Jennifer Neville, Purdue University 
Filip Radlinski, Microsoft