Contests in Signal Processing and Machine Learning

During the last couple of months a number of machine learning and signal processing contests have recently finished and the final rankings have been announced. Some of those recently concluded ones include:

The 2014 IEEE Data Fusion contest: As always the contest is organized by the Data Fusion technical committee of the IEEE. This year the topic focused on fusion of hyperspectral (infrared range) data and high resolution visual data. Among other gifts, the contest awards an IEEE certificate of appreciation to the winners of the best classification challenge and another IEEE certificate of appreciation to the winners of the best paper challenge.

The 2014 MLSP contest: The contest is organized as part of the MLSP workshop supported by the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the thematic this year was schizophrenia classification. The contest was hosted in Kaggle and attracted 341 participants.

The KDD Cup 2014 is the annual Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery competition organized by ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. This year’s topic was predicting excitement at an online charity. The contest was also held on Kaggle, attracting 476 participating teams.

The IEEE Signal Processing Cup, is a competition that provides undergraduate students with the opportunity to form teams and work together to solve a challenging and interesting real-world problem using signal-processing techniques and methods. Three teams were awarded during the ICASSP 2014 Conference.

AASP TC started a new activity, AASP Challenges directed by Patrick Naylor, Chair of AASP TC’s Challenges Subcommittee. In the coming year, a new Challenge will be running: “Characterization of Acoustic Environments (ACE)”. Organizers are Nick Gaubitch from Delft University and James Eaton and Patrick Naylor from Imperial College London. This will have the dissemination event at ICASSP2015.