NeurIPS 2022 Call for Competitions

by Marco Ciccone, Jake Albrecht, Gustavo Stolovitzky, NeurIPS 2022 Competition Chairs

This year will mark the sixth year of NeurIPS having a dedicated competitions track!

Check the Call for Competitions here and find out how to submit your proposal. Submissions are now open on CMT until 20th April 2022 23.59 AOE!

The competition chairs for 2022 are Marco Ciccone, Politecnico di Torino, Gustavo Stolovitzky, CSO of Sema4 and DREAM Challenges Chair Emeritus, and Jake Albrecht from Sage Bionetworks also a DREAM Challenges Director.

Marco is a postdoctoral researcher at Politecnico di Torino. He is interested in understanding and discovering relationships across tasks to speed up knowledge transfer for incremental learning and privacy-preserving applications. During his PhD, he actively participated in video object segmentation and neural network robustness challenges. He brings his experience from last year as Competition and Demo co-chair, and he is excited to be part again of the NeurIPS organizing team.

Gustavo is the Chief Science Officer at Sema4, a company that emphasizes the use of well-benchmarked machine learning algorithms to help patients get the best out of their data. Previous to Sema4, Gustavo spent 23 years at IBM Research where he was an IBM Fellow and led programs in Translational Systems Biology, Nanobiotechnology, and Exploratory Life Sciences. In 2007 Gustavo founded the DREAM Challenges, an effort to foster open science, data sharing, collaborative work, and rigor to algorithm development in translational medicine. Gustavo is thrilled to co-Chair with Marco and Jake the Competition Track of this year’s NeurIPS conference and looks forward to the good ideas resulting from this call for competition proposals.

Jake is the Director of Challenges and Benchmarking at Sage Bionetworks where he is responsible for developing new capabilities and overseeing execution for challenges that address complex biomedical research questions.  As a DREAM Director, he is passionate about organizing community challenges as a forum to drive open, collaborative, and reproducible science.  Jake was impressed with the breadth and quality of the past year’s competitions and is looking forward to this year’s program!

What’s changing?

NeurIPS 2022 will be a hybrid conference hosting a dedicated Competition Track, where results will be presented and discussed by participants and organizers. The Competition Track is currently planned to be fully virtual. Further details on the organization will be released in the following months.

This year we will not have live competitions. Instead, we will focus on data science competitions, where participants will compete to obtain the best score on a machine learning task of interest to the NeurIPS community, based on a well-defined problem and corresponding data defined and released by the organizers of the competition.

Technological advances in our field can have the potential to disproportionately hurt marginalized sectors in society — including people of color, people from working-class backgrounds, women, and LGBTQ people. Hence, we strongly encourage proposals that address these problems, especially from researchers with these identities or who are members of other marginalized or under-represented communities.

We have a new submission template for proposals to simplify the submission and review process, limiting writeups to 8 pages total.

How does a competition work?

It’s quite simple! After the submission date, competition proposals will be reviewed, and accepted competitions will be announced to the public in early May. Generally, the competitions will run from then onwards until the end of October. Competition organizers supply any necessary data and/or additional resources and take on the job of making the competition a success. During the conference, competitions will have dedicated sessions where winners, organizers, and other participants can discuss the competition outcomes.

Competitions are a great way to build a research community around a topic, encourage people to work on things that you care about, and generally have fun tackling exciting problems together.

Where can I find the call?

The call is available here.

Submissions for proposals are now open on CMT.

Don’t miss the deadline on 20th April 2022 23.59 AOE!

Please feel free to reach out to competition-chairs@neurips.cc if you have any questions! We look forward to your proposals!