Call for WSDM Cup Proposals

All deadlines are 11:59 pm anywhere on earth.

We are delighted to open the call for proposals for hosting challenge problems for the WSDM Cup 2025, a high impact ML / AI competition event that will be co-located with the WSDM 2025 main conference in Hannover, Germany from March 10-14th.

Competitions of this form are a crucial part of the research ecosystem, bringing together world-class experts from all over the world to independently evaluate their own best ideas on an important problem. Past experience has shown this process to create both amazing progress on specific problems, but also help to achieve a depth of validation and understanding in a way that lives up to the highest ideals of empirical rigor for AI and ML as research field.

We are seeking proposals for challenge problems and datasets from both industrial and academic institutions, with an emphasis on novel challenges that will help uncover the most topical and important issues facing the WSDM community today.

Furthermore, we are delighted to announce that this year’s challenge (or challenges, if more than one is selected) will be conducted on Kaggle and that the WSDM Cup will be supported by full-time Kaggle staff. In addition to waiving their usual fees for a selected WSDM challenge, Kaggle will also be providing a USD 50,000 prize fund in order to attract the largest possible levels of participation from across the community.

We strongly encourage all interested institutions and research groups to submit proposals and be part of this important challenge. Hosting the challenge is a fantastic way to bring a strong spotlight to previously under-studied areas or emerging topics, to showcase expertise, to establish new benchmarks in the field, and to contribute to advancing the field forward on real world problems.

Submissions will be reviewed on their ability to meet the following requirements:

• A clear, well justified description of the problem, including why it is broadly important for the WSDM community in terms of novelty, significance, or timeliness.
• A challenging but manageable and well scoped problem. In particular, there should be reasonable assessment that the problem is both feasible to approach and that is has appropriate “headroom” for remaining advances and discoveries to make improvements.
• A concise and well defined description of any data that will be provided. This should include notes on timelines for collection, which should be completed and allow time for verification and checking for issues such as leakage well in advance of the competitions start date. Additionally, any issues around data licensing should be described. Lastly, it is important that any private test data be truly private, and have never appeared previously in any published or internet-accessible public form.
• Accessibility for non-domain experts. The proposal should describe how researchers who are generally familiar with AI and ML but perhaps not familiar with the specific problem domain may engage with the problem, or what additional materials will be provided to help give appropriate context.
• A clear description of evaluation metrics and evaluation protocols. In order to ensure objective and fair evaluations, and to ensure strong research value as an outcome of the challenge, it is critical that metrics and evaluation protocols are carefully thought through and described in exact detail. Automated evaluation is preferred wherever possible due to cost, scale, and repeatability.
• Clear description of how the problem will fit within Kaggle structures as a platform, including any open questions for the Kaggle team to address or discuss. Note that we may engage in dialog with potential hosts to talk through potential issues to ensure feasibility or to find creative solutions for critical aspects.
• A complete timeline of the competition, including timeline for data collection, preparation, and validation, for the competition itself to run, and for any post-competition verification, and for knowledge sharing following the close of the competition.

Please send your proposals to wsdm-2025-wsdm_cup-chairs@googlegroups.com in PDF format by the submission deadlines specified above.