The Institute of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence (IARAI) GmbH, registered at Landstraßer Hauptstraße 5, 1030 Vienna, Austria (“Organizer”) 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 Weather4Cast 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.
Each Competition has its own Terms and Conditions.
Please find the Terms and Conditions for Weather4cast 2021 on a separate page.
Please find the Terms and Conditions for Weather4cast 2022 below.
2. Conditions of Participation
b) have created a user account with the Organizer; and
c) have read the content of these Terms, accepted their provisions and agreed to participate in the Competition as described on the website www.iarai.ac.at/weather4cast (“Organizer’s Website”).
Competition is open to residents of all countries, except for residents of Iran, Crimea, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, Cuba and any other countries which are subject to EU and/or US sanctions not allowing participation in the Competition.
2. The Organizer’s employees who are directly involved in the work related to the Competition and members of their families, as well as employees of IARAI, AEMET, and EUMETSAT and their affiliates 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 leaderboards 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”). Participants may collaborate together as a Team, however a Participant may not participate on more than one 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. The Jury for the competition is assembled by the Organizer, and will assess the validity and scientific merit of submissions. It will comprise a minimum of three independent academics external to the Organizer.
6. All dates and times are Anywhere on Earth (UTC–12) (hereafter referred to as AOE) unless mentioned otherwise. Competition Challenges, announced on the Organizer’s Website, will include, at a minimum, the core challenge of forecasting the accuracy of weather map movie predictions as measured by the evaluation metric assessing the prediction quality of the submitted pixel values for the future 32 images (corresponding to a prediction of 8 hours into the future). Further details of the metric are specified in the Evaluation section of the Organizer’s Website, specifically this metric may change when this increases the scientific value of the competition.
7. The Competition will commence on 15 August, 2022 and will last until 23:59 CET (UTC + 1) on 14 November, 2022 (hereafter referred to as “Submission Deadline”). The
competition consists of four phases:
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Phase 1 (15 August 2022 – 14 November 2022): Participants are provided with training and validation data (with the ground truth) and test data (without the ground truth) to train their models. The performance of the submission on the test dataset will be displayed on the online leaderboard when this becomes available. This phase may consist of more than one stage where participants are given different datasets to train their models.
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Phase 2 (15 November 2022 – 18 November 2022). Participants receive the held-out data set (without the ground truth) and must submit their predictions within 3 days from the release of the held-out data set. The performance of the submission on the held-out dataset will be displayed on a separate online leaderboard. The submissions per team during that period will be limited to a count of 3.
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Phase 3 (19 November 2022 – 21 November 2022). Participants must submit a scientific manuscript / extended abstract as outlined on the Organizer’s Website. Each manuscript must describe the addressed problem, the proposed method, and the experimental results and it will be a subject to peer review by the Jury.
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Phase 4 (starting from 15 December 2022). Participants can still submit predictions to be compared with a withheld data set to be scored on the leaderboards published on the Organizer’s Website. No awards will be provided during this phase. This phase and the leaderboard can be closed, terminating the Competition, at the discretion of the Organizer.
8. Participants are tasked with creating a solution during the Competition. All proposed solutions and case studies should be built based on the weather map movie data provided by the Data Provider (“Data Sets”) or any other data that is publicly available to all Participants. This data contains precipitation data of the Operational Program for Exchange of Weather Radar Information radar network (OPERA) reprojected by AEMET to EUMETSAT Meteosat Second Generation projection, as well as noise distorted radiances computed using data from geostationary satellites operated by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) spanning from February 2019 until December 2021.
9. In order to work on Competition Challenges, Participants must download the Data Sets from the Organizer’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:
(i) Competition start: 15 August, 2022
(ii) Ability to submit solutions for scoring at announced frequency and service level: from 25 August, 2022
(iii) Submission Deadline: 23:59 CET on 11 November 2022
(iv) Submissions on held-out private data deadline: 23:59 CET on 18 November 2022
(v) Submission of a short scientific paper deadline: 23:59 CET on 21 November 2022
(iv) Announcement of Winners: 26 November, 2022.
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 evaluated based on the prediction error as described on the Organizer’s Website and the scientific contribution of the submitted solution as assessed by academic peers comprising the Jury. 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 at the end of the competition (all phases). Scores from all submissions will be published with the Announcement of Winners. The public leaderboards will already show scores while the submission is running.
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) Generalizability of the approach and 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 1,000€ to the Participant/Team.
d) Additional vouchers or cash prizes worth up to 7,000€ can be awarded for special difficult bonus tasks or outstanding scientific manuscripts at the discretion of the Jury.
5. Submission of working code, learned parameters, a positive review of an accompanying short scientific paper with a sufficiently detailed description of the approach used, and presenting the winning solution during the Symposium (if organized) is required to be awarded a prize, and this is verified by the Jury. 6. The Jury may decide not to award a prize based on the quality of the accompanying scientific manuscript as determined by scientific peer review .
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 shall be the owners of all intellectual property rights to works created during the Competition. Unless otherwise agreed between the Participants and the data provider, Participants are permitted to use the Data Sets exclusively for the purposes of the Competition. Specifically, participants are not allowed to use the competition Data Sets for commercial purposes or exploitation for profit, or redistribute them. Participants shall license the Competition submissions and the source code used to generate the Competition submissions under an Apache 2.0 License (www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt) that in no case (i) limits commercial use of such code or model containing or depending on such code and (ii) violates the intellectual property rights of any third party. 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 arxiv.org and at the Competition Symposium, if organized. The Participants shall further comply with all requirements set by 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 in Jury 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.