The Institute of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence (IARAI) GmbH, registered at Landstraßer Hauptstraße 5, 1030 Vienna, Austria (“Organizer” and “Data Provider”) organizes several online discussion forums, a range of data analysis competitions, and related physical meetings with the main purpose of scientific education and exchange.
In order to participate in the skills-based Landslide4Sense competition, including the forums, and/or related personal meetings, if any (“Competition”), you must first accept these Terms and Conditions (“Terms”). If after reading these Terms, you decide not to accept them, please do not confirm acceptance. If you accept these Terms, you will declare that you have read and understood these Terms and agreed to them.
1. Initial Provisions
1. These Terms specify the rules and process for conducting the Competition organized by the Organizer.
2. The Organizer might organize a symposium in order to present the winning solutions of the Competition (“Symposium”) in which case the winners will be notified accordingly; the costs related to the Symposium will be borne by the Organizer at its discretion.
2. Conditions of Participation
1. The Competition is intended for natural persons who, at the time of registering for participation in the Competition, meet the following criteria:
a) have created a user account with the Organizer; and
b) have read the content of these Terms, accepted their provisions and agreed to participate in the Competition as described on the website https://www.iarai.ac.at/Landslide4Sense (“Organizer’s Website”).
The Competition is open to residents of all countries, except for residents of Iran, Crimea, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, Cuba, Russia and Belarus and any other countries which are subject to EU and/or US sanctions not allowing participation in the Competitions.
2. The Organizer’s employees who are directly involved in the work related to the Competition and members of their families are prohibited from participating in the Competition. Family members shall mean ascendants, descendants, siblings, spouse’s siblings, spouse’s parents, relatives in the sideline to the first degree and persons in the adoption or marriage ratio.
3. Participation in the Competition is free and voluntary.
3. Protection of Personal Data
1. The personal data of participants to the Competition (“Participants”) is collected by the Organizer, in order to process the registration, to organize and manage the Competition and provide information about related events or events organized by the Organizer in the future.
2. With the acceptance of these Terms, the Participants consent to and expressly authorize the Organizer to use their personal data for the above purposes and transfer their data to partners or sponsors of the Organizer for the purpose of the Competition.
3. Participants accept that their identity can be published on leader boards displayed on the Organizer’s Website and, should a prize be won, it can also be published on the Organizer’s Website to announce the recipient of the respective prize.
4. Participants can exercise their rights of access, rectification, cancellation and opposition by sending a certified letter or email to the Organizer, clearly indicating the right exercised.
4. Competition Rules
1. In order to participate in the Competition, applicants must register by accepting these Terms as described on the Organizer’s Website.
2. During the Competition, Participants can work individually or in a team (hereinafter “Team”).
3. The Organizer reserves the right to limit the number of entries submitted to the Competition.
4. During the Competition, Participants/Teams will work on any of the challenges described in detail on the Organizer’s Website (“Competition Challenges”).
5. The prizes or distinctions specified in the Terms will be awarded to the Participants/Teams who, in accordance with these Terms, will present the best competition entries in the jury’s opinion.
6. All dates and times are Central European Time (UTC+2) (hereafter referred to as CET) unless mentioned otherwise.
7. The Competition will commence at 12:00 CET on 1 April, 2022 and will last until 23:59 CET on 20 June, 2022. The Competition consists of three phases:
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Phase 1 (April 1st – June 15th): Participants are provided with training data (with labels) and additional validation images (without labels) to train and validate their methods. Participants can submit their landslide detection results for the validation set (not more than 1000 times) to the competition website to get feedback on the performance (Precision, Recall, and F1 score). The performance of the submission will be displayed on the online leaderboard. In addition, participants should submit a short description of the methodology (1-2 pages) to Landslide4Sense@iarai.ac.at according to the IJCAI template.
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Phase 2 (June 15th – June 20th): Participants receive the test data set (without labels) and must submit their landslide detection results within 5 days from the release of the test data set. The submissions during that week will be limited to 10 times and only the F1 score will be displayed on the online leaderboard.
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Phase 3 (June 25th – July 10th): Phase 3 only concerns the selected winners. Following the announcement of the winners, they will have to write a 4-page IJCAI-style formatted manuscript that will be included in the CDCEO workshop. Each manuscript describes the addressed problem, the proposed method, and the experimental results. The winners will be asked to send a short pre-recorded video presentation. However, they should still be present for a live Question-and-Answer period with the audience and session chair.
8. Participants are tasked with creating a solution during the Competition. All proposed solutions and preprocessing should be built based on the provided data. Participants are not allowed to add or incorporate any other auxiliary publicly available or commercial data. Moreover, participants must agree to work with the provided annotations (mask data set), and any changes (manual labeling) to them are prohibited.
9. In order to work on Competition Challenges, Participants must download the Data Sets from the Data Provider’s website and accept the applicable terms and conditions. The Organizer will specify the link to the data on the Organizer’s website. Participants may use publicly available programming libraries and are required to use their own equipment during the Competition.
10. The Competition will be conducted according to the following schedule:
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April 1st (Phase 1): Contest opens. Release training and validation data. The validation leaderboard starts to receive submissions.
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June 12th (Phase 1): A short description of the methodology (1-2 pages) according to the IJCAI template.
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June 15th (Phase 2): Release test data. The validation leaderboard closes and the test leaderboard starts to receive submissions.
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June 20th (Phase 2): The test leaderboard stops accepting submissions.
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June 25th: Winner announcement. Invitations to present at the Special Competition Session at the CDCEO workshop.
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July 10th (Phase 3): Full manuscript (4-pages, IJCAI formatted) submission deadline and pre-recorded presentation video deadline.
11. Participants who participate in the Symposium (if organized) will present their solutions to the public.
12. Ideas or projects whose presentation, execution or development is susceptible to infringing the law and/or violating the rights of third parties will not be admitted. Solutions that promote violence or discrimination based on sex, age, beliefs, ideology or any other reason will not be accepted either.
13. In the event a Participant or a Team violates the provisions of the Terms and/or applicable law, the Organizer will have the right to disqualify the Participant or the respective Team.
5. Prizes
1. Competition entries will be evaluated by the jury composed of the Organizer’s organization committee as stated on the Organizer’s Website. The core Competition Challenge will be solely evaluated on the F1 score as described on the Organizer’s Website, but other challenges, if they are not based on purely numerical decision making, will be judged by the jury at its sole discretion. For some challenges, as announced on the Organizer’s Website, a private held-out test data set will be used to determine submission ranking, which will be published with the Announcement of Winners, in addition to the public leader-board during the training and validation phase before.
2. Competition entries for challenges that are not subject to a clear numerical metric will be evaluated according to the following criteria: a) Innovation and attractiveness of the solution, b) Exclusiveness for landslide detection task c) Elegance.
3. The final leaderboard will take into account only the best submission for each Participant/Team according to the metric provided. The jury will nominate one Participant/Team from each Competition Challenge to the Symposium (if organized).
4. The Organizer provides prizes to the winners of the core Competition Challenges as follows:
a) 1st place: a voucher or cash prize worth 5,000€ to the Participant/Team;
b) 2nd place: a voucher or cash prize worth 3,000€ to the Participant/Team;
c) 3rd place: a voucher or cash prize worth 2,000€ to the Participant/Team.
d) Also special prizes for more selected submissions.
5. Submission of working code, learned parameters, and a four pages scientific paper with a sufficiently detailed description of the approach used is required to be awarded a prize, and this is verified by the jury.
6. The submitted software code generating the winning submission must be documented according to the guidelines provided on the Organizer’s Website and must include a complete list of dependencies / resources required to build and/or run the code successfully and replicate the winning solution.
7. The potential winners will be notified by email. If a potential winner does not respond to the notification attempt within three (3) days from the first notification attempt an alternate potential winner will be selected by the jury from among all eligible entries received based on the Competition’s criteria.
8. The Organizer may award additional prizes to the Participants/Teams.
9. The decisions of the jury are final and cannot be appealed.
10. The Organizer is not responsible for any taxes, customs charges, or other costs required for or related to receiving a prize. Each winner is required to independently declare and pay any applicable taxes and charges that a prize gives rise to in the respective jurisdiction.
6. Intellectual Property Rights
1. Participants must follow the terms and conditions of the Organizer as well as of the auxiliary data providers of Sentinel-2 https://sentinel.esa.int/documents/247904/690755/sentinel_data_legal_notice and ALOS PALSAR https://asf.alaska.edu/data-sets/sar-data-sets/alos-palsar/alos-palsar-terms-and-conditions.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Participants are permitted to publish articles and documentation regarding their Competition submissions in academic and scientific publications under terms that are common for the purposes of such publications, whereas they shall publish their Competition submissions on https://arxiv.org/ and at the Competition Symposium, if organized. The Participants shall further comply with all requirements set by the Data Provider in the license governing use of the Data Sets. In particular, the Competition needs to be cited as described on the Competition website.
2. Participants declare that the solution submitted during the Competition is their authorship and does not violate any rights of third parties. Participants also declare that they assume full and unlimited liability for any claims of third parties directed against the Organizer, arising in connection with the Participants’ performance or activity related to the Competition Challenge.
7. Image rights
1. By participating in the Symposium (if organized), Participants grant the Organizer permission to record their image on photographic and video materials for promotional purposes for an indefinite period of time, without restrictions and without remuneration. The Organizer shall also have the right to publish and publicly display through different communication channels (including press releases and entries in blogs and other channels such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.) the images of Participants and other Competition information for any purpose, without any financial compensation to the Participants.
8. Cancellation of the Competition
The Organizer reserves the right to cancel or modify the Competition.
9. Risks and Liability
1. During the Symposium (if organized), Participants shall not be under the influence of alcohol or drugs and they shall do their best to avoid the possibility of being injured. Participants commit to carefully consider the risks inherent in any activity in which they choose to participate and to take reasonable precautions before attending the Symposium. Participants understand that their attendance at the Symposium will be voluntary and they will undertake to assume responsibility for any resulting injury to the maximum extent permitted by applicable laws.
2. Participants hereby release, waive, exempt and agree not to sue the Organizer and their respective parent companies, subsidiaries, affiliates, directors, officers, partners, shareholders, members, agents, employees, distributors, sponsors and volunteers for any claim, demand, right of action, damage, loss or expense (including procedural costs and reasonable legal fees) that may arise or result from their participation in the Competition and attendance at the Symposium (if organized), except in case of gross negligence of the Organizer.
3. Participants agree to hold harmless the Organizer, its parent companies, subsidiaries, affiliates, directors, officers, employees, agents and representatives, from any and all claims or demands made by third parties, related to their participation in the Competition.
10. Interpretation
1. Any doubt or discrepancy arising from the application or interpretation of these Terms during the Competition, will be resolved ultimately by the Organizer. The Terms are governed by the laws of Austria without giving effect to conflict of laws provisions. Depending on the place of Participants’ residence, additional local rules and regulations may apply. Sole venue will be in the courts of Vienna, Austria.
11. Final Provisions
1. The Organizer reserves the right to change the Terms. The Competition may be subject to additional terms specified on the Organizer’s Website.
2. The Organizer will inform the Participants about the change of the Terms by electronic means and will place the Terms in the new wording on the Organizer’s Website.
3. These Terms are published on the Organizer’s Website.