We are excited to announce our Science4cast 2021 competition opening this week. Science4cast is an official competition within the 2021 IEEE BigData Cup Challenges. The competition goal is to capture the evolution of scientific concepts and predict the emerging research topics. As the number of scientific papers grows exponentially, researches have to specialize in narrow sub-disciplines, making it difficult to uncover scientific concepts beyond their area. To open new avenues of research, scientific ideas need to transcend the individual focus bubbles.
Our machine learning challenge in the Science of Science looks into the heart of this problem. We created a semantic network characterizing the content of scientific literature in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning since 1994. Each node in the network represents a concept in AI; edges between nodes are drawn when two concepts are investigated together in a scientific paper. The competition task is to predict the future states of this exponentially growing semantic network to create models capturing the evolution of scientific concepts in the field. Solutions to this competition will be instrumental in the pursuit of a wide range of exciting questions, including discovery of scientific concept and suggestions of personalized research ideas.
The top three winners of the competition will be awarded the following prizes:
- 1st place: voucher or cash prize worth 8.000 EUR to the participant/team;
- 2nd place: voucher or cash prize worth 6.000 EUR to the participant/team;
- 3rd place: voucher or cash prize worth 2.000 EUR to the participant/team.
In addition, special prizes will be awarded to outstanding or creative solutions, should they exist. They will also potentially include a fellowship position at IARAI in Vienna, Austria.
To be awarded a prize, participants must submit the working code, the learned parameters, and a short scientific paper (4-6 pages) with a sufficiently detailed description of the approach to be published in the IEEE BigData conference proceedings.
Competition timeline:
- Data Release: 25 August 2021;
- Submission deadline (competition closes): 3 November 2021;
- Abstract submission deadline: 17 November 2021;
- Announcement of the winners: 2 December 2021;
- IEEE BigData 2021 conference: 15-18 December 2021.
