Call for Proposals: WSDM Cup

• Proposal deadline: Apr 17, 2015
• Notification: mid May, 2015

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 WSDM 2016 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@microsoft.com by 17 April 2015. Notification will be sent mid May.

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