Call for Competitions

We invite proposals for the competition track of the 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR2020) to be held in Milan, Italy. After the success of the past years, a new edition of the competition track will be held at ICPR 2020. We solicit competition proposals on any topic of interest to the ICPR  community. We especially encourage competition proposals from emerging new fields or new application domains related to pattern recognition. Interdisciplinary topics that will attract a significant cross-section of the community are especially highly encouraged.

There will be two types of competitions:

  • Standard data science competitions, where participants will compete to obtain the best score on a data driven task of interest to the pattern recognition community based on a problem defined by the organizers of the competition.
  • Live competitions, which will be held in a “science-fair” manner at ICPR 2020. Participants will present live demos at ICPR 2020 which apply methodology to an application domain defined by the organizers of the live competition.

There will be a competition track at ICPR 2020, co-located with the conference, where competition results will be presented and discussed, a small slot of time will be given to each competition.  Competition organizers will be asked to propose a tentative schedule for presentation of the competition and its results during an assigned time slot; ICPR  will provide coffee breaks and, if necessary, poster facilities. In addition, competition organizers may want to submit a workshop proposal, but such a process is independent of the competition track.

Reviewing and selection process

A competition program committee will be formed, consisting of experts on the scope of the conference and on challenge organization. Each proposal will be reviewed by at least three members of the committee. The factors that will be considered when evaluating proposals include:

• Task chosen: Impact, originality, relevance to the ICPR community will all be considered. Tasks that include humanitarian and/or positive societal impact are especially highly encouraged, although other topics relevant to the ICPR community will also be considered. Competition should have sufficient number of participants to be able to draw meaningful conclusions.
• Protocol of competition: Feasibility of the task chosen, soundness of the evaluation criteria, and clarity and fairness of the competition rules will all be considered. Datasets used in the competitions should be made available after the end of the competitions, if they are not already available.
• Logistics: Schedule, plan for attracting competition participants, and experience and diversity of the organizers will all be considered. The specific plan for attracting participants of groups under-represented at ICPR  will be considered.

Proposal preparation and submission

Standard data science and live competition proposals must both be submitted via CMT at:
https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/CTICPR2020

Please carefully follow the provided Latex template when preparing proposals.

Important dates

  • Competition proposal submission deadline: January 25, 2020
  • Acceptance notification: February 25, 2020
  • Competition track: September, 2020

Additional comments

  • Competition organizers should propose a timeline for running the competition to ensure that participants have enough time to contribute a high-quality entries. It is recommended that competitions be completed by late June or early July 2020 at the absolute latest.
  • Competition organizers that require help or suggestions regarding competition platforms for running the competition can contact the competition chair for advice.

Previous competitions

Competition chairs