Challenges and Data Collections

SPS Challenge Program

As a service to the SPS community, the SPS Challenge Program offers support to challenge organizers by

• providing an organizational framework for a five-stage process from the proposal to the dissemination of results
• granting official SPS sponsorship to approved SPS challenges, including use of SPS communication channels  
• promoting dissemination of the results by publishing challenge overview papers in the journals of SPS

The SPS Challenge Program is operated by the Challenges and Data Collections (CDC) Committee of the Technical Directions Board of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and as such reflects a joint effort of all Technical Committees of the Society. Its fundamental goal is to

• to encourage and support research with comparable and reproducible results in relevant, timely and impactful signal processing tasks;
• to identify, and to encourage the collection of, appropriate data-sets that embody those signal processing tasks and to support the sharing of such data-sets widely in the community;
• to identify appropriate performance metrics for the relevant tasks and, where appropriate, disseminate standardized tools for computing those metrics;
• to identify the state-of-the-art methods for such signal processing tasks and evaluate their performance comparatively on the identified data-sets; and
• to disseminate the results of Challenges and subsequent scientific insights widely within the society and externally.

SPS Challenge Program Proposal Form

We hereby invite challenge proposals to be submitted by email to the SPS Challenge Program. 
Please note, if a challenge is already underway it cannot be supported by the SPS Challenge Program.
Download the challenge proposal form below, fill out and submit to the email address indicated on the form.

Deadline for Challenge Proposals: 24 May 2025
Notification of Acceptance: 7 June 2025
Contact: Aladine Chetouani

Data Challenges Program Proposal Form

SPS Conference Challenges

The Challenges and Data Collections Committee will support conference challenges by:

• advertising it broadly and beyond conferences for the existence of the challenges;
• maintaining visibility after the challenge is finished, and thus;
• keeping track and history for their scientific long-term value;
• promoting and easing the publication of review/challenge/database paper publications.

The Conference Challenges would follow these steps:

• The CDC Committee will appoint a representative to sit on the Conference Organizing Committee to help support the challenge.
• The Conference Challenge Organizing Committee and the CDC representative will select the challenges to be hosted by the conference. In that process, the CDC representative may consult with the CDC committee as necessary.
• The Conference Challenge Organizing Committee will provide the CDC Committee with all information related to the proposed challenges, both the hosted and rejected ones, notably contact information, so that the CDC Committee can take the required action to make the challenges visible on the CDC website and to contact the challenge organizers. In return, the conference site will refer to the CDC website.
• The Conference Challenge Organizers will communicate with the CDC Committee to discuss potential follow-ups (long-term/broader visibility, review/challenge/database paper publication).

News & Updates

1. Free IEEE DataPort subscriptions to society members!

2. CDC encourages the challenge organizers to consider the IEEE journals like IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing and IEEE Data Descriptions (coming in 2024) as possible publication venues for the dissemination of challenge outputs.

3. Webinar: IEEE DataPort: Why and How to Use it for Challenge.