[Air-L] Call For WSDM Cup Proposals

[Ugur Kursuncu]

Dear Researcher,

We (Neil Shah, Jerry Zitao Liu, Lei Li) are co-organizing WSDM Cup 2022
<https://www.wsdm-conference.org/2022/call-for-wsdm-cup-proposals/>, a
machine learning competition-style event co-located with the leading WSDM
conference (International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining).  The
conference has high-visibility, and is regularly attended by experts in the
field.

We are looking for competition tasks, and we are e-mailing you in hopes
that you may have an task/idea to contribute; competition tasks regularly
draw 100-200 teams of experts who dedicate their time to working on and
achieving the best results on your task.  This is an excellent opportunity
to solicit expert feedback and brainpower towards solving your problems,
identifying intern and FTE candidates, and building improved collaborations
with your organization and academia.  Typically, competition tasks are
Kaggle-style, offering a clear specification of objective, a dataset (can
be anonymized and de-identified appropriately), and a small reward for
top-3 winning teams (typically ~$5K total, split across winners).

Past tasks have come from amazing partners like Microsoft, Wikimedia,
Adobe, ByteDance, Spotify, Baidu and more, on tasks as diverse as fake news
classification, user retention prediction, music recommendation, vandalism
detection, and knowledge-base completion, and winning teams have received
excellent results across the board.  You can find task specifications, and
associated results below for inspiration: 2016
<https://www.wsdm-conference.org/2016/wsdm-cup.html>, 2017
<https://www.wsdm-cup-2017.org/>, 2018
<http://www.wsdm-conference.org/2018/call-for-participants.html>, 2019
<http://www.wsdm-conference.org/2019/wsdm-cup-2019.php>, 2020
<https://www.wsdm-conference.org/2020/wsdm-cup-2020.php>.



Please let us know if you have a tentative idea in mind.  We are happy to
work with you on identifying and narrowing task specification.  We expect
competitions to run from mid-October to January, with the final results
settled and the physical WSDM Cup event held around February 21-25, in
conjunction with WSDM 2022, so there is time yet to ideate and put
something together concretely.

Cheers.

---
Ugur Kursuncu, PhD
Publicity Co-chair for ACM WSDM 2022

Postdoctoral Fellow
AI Institute, University of South Carolina