CALL FOR COMPETITION PROPOSALS

The International Joint Conference on Neural Networks is soliciting competition proposals. Areas of interest include,but are not limited to:

Pattern recognition (speech, handwriting, images, vision, video)

Time series prediction (forecasting, causality in time series)

Data mining (marketing, social networks, credit rating)

Text processing (ranking, translation)

Bioinformatics (diagnosis, prognosis, drug discovery)

Competitions involving demonstrations taking place at the conference are particularly encouraged.

Up to 4 competitions will be selected. Each competition will receive two conference+workshop free registrations (one for the organizer and one as prize or both as prizes), but may also plan to provide additional prizes. The competition participants may submit papers to the IJCNN 2011 conference. All accepted papers will have a poster in a special session at the main conference and the best papers will have oral presentations in a special IJCNN 2011 competition workshop. Registering for the conference is a condition for being published in the conference proceedings, but not for entering the competition or participating in the workshop.

A proposal should include a short paragraph on each of the following items:

Description of the problem addressed, with general background information on the application domain.

Description of the available data, guarantee of availability, guarantee of confidentiality of the "ground truth", and size.

Description of the competition tasks, their scientific and technical merit and their practical significance.

Description of the evaluation procedures and established baselines (provide evidence that non-trivial performance can be achieved, and an estimate of what constitutes a significant difference in performance).

List of the available resources (team member availability, computers, support staff, other equipment, sponsors).

Schedule. The competition should start no later than beginning of December 2010 to allow the participants to submit papers to the conference (deadline end of January) and last approximately 6 to 8 weeks. The results should preferably be known at review time and definitely before the deadline for camera ready submission (May 2011). Names, affiliations, postal addresses, phone numbers, and short biographies of the organizers.

Whether the competition is new or has been held before.

What prizes will be awarded to the winning teams.

A good competition task is one that is practically useful, scientifically or technically challenging, can be done without extensive application domain knowledge, and can be evaluated objectively. Tips for preparing good proposals are available at:
http://clopinet.com/isabelle/Projects/IEEE/

Proposal submission: by email to ijcnn2011@clopinet.com
Deadline: August 31, 2010

Competition co-chairs:
Sven Crone
Isabelle Guyon