CALL FOR COMPETITIONS AND CHALLENGES

We invite proposals for Competitions and Challenges of IJCAI-ECAI 2022, the 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 23rd European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which is planned to be held in Vienna, Austria, from July 23rd to 29th, 2022. We solicit competition and challenge proposals on any topic of interest to the artificial intelligence (AI) community.

Proposal Submission

Proposals must be submitted via CMT at: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/IJCAIcompetitions2022/

Each submitted proposal needs to include the following information.

  1. Contact information: Please provide the organizers’ names, phone numbers and email addresses.
  1. The proposed competition or challenge: Please describe the overall goal of the challenge or competition. Which subfields of AI are needed to solve the challenge or to win the competition? If this competition / challenge has been held in the past or if already you have created a website for a new competition, please provide the URL.
  1. Participants: How many teams do you expect to attract? How certain are you of that? How many teams do you expect to attend IJCAI-ECAI 2022 in person?
  1. Prizes of the proposed competition or challenge: Do you plan to provide prizes for winners (and runners-up)? If so, what is the form of the prizes (gift card, trophy, small gifts or others)? What is the expected amount of money needed to prepare the prizes? Where will you get that money from and how certain is it to secure that funding?
  1. Source code: How will other researchers and society in general benefit from your competition / challenge? In particular, what is your plan on sharing the source code of participating systems? Will it be shared with other participants? Will it be open sourced or conditionally open sourced with a certain type of license (please specify the license)?
  1. Timeline in milestones: Please describe the detailed timeline of running this competition or challenge, including but not limited to
    • when you will send out a “Call for Participation”;
    • when will be the submission deadline for the competition or challenge;
    • how many phases there are in the competition or challenge, and if there is more than one phase, when will be the submission deadlines for each phase;
    • when will the participants be notified.
  1. Post-proceedings / publications: We are considering the option to organize a peer-reviewed post volume with papers about the most interesting agents / algorithms / techniques developed for the competitions and challenges run at IJCAI-ECAI 2022, as well as for one paper per competition or challenge that describes the lessons learnt from running the competition / challenge. We would only do so if there is sufficient interest among the majority of competitions. Would you consider this an attractive option for participants in your competition/challenge?
  1. During the conference: Please indicate the resources you will need during the conference. Specifically, please provide the bare minimum you need as well as modest “nice to have” for each of the following types of resources. The evaluation of the proposal will take into account the minimum requirements you provide. Once we accept your proposal we will allocate the resources as fairly as we can over all accepted competitions/challenges.
    • Floor space in square meters (minimum & nice to have)?
    • Number of beamers with screens required (minimum & nice to have)?
    • Number of monitors required (minimum & nice to have)?
    • Number of tables (minimum & nice to have)?
    • Number of chairs (minimum & nice to have)?
    • Number of electricity sockets and watts (minimum & nice to have)?
    • Wifi accessibility (must-have or nice-to-have)?
    • Private space (must-have or nice-to-have)? In other words, can your competition or challenge be held in open space, e.g., the lobby?
  1. Any other information that you think we need to know.

You may refer to the competitions accepted at IJCAI 2021

(https://ijcai-21.org/competitions/) as examples.

Important Dates

Competition or Challenge proposal submission deadline: February 2, 2022

Acceptance notification: March 2, 2022

Deadlines are 23:59 Pacific Time (PST/PDT) for all dates

Enquiries

Please send all enquiries about the Competitions Track to the IJCAI-ECAI 2022 Track Chairs Michael Thielscher (UNSW, Australia) and  Dengji Zhao (ShanghaiTech, China) at competitions@ijcai-22.org.