Introduction to NIPS 2017 Competition Track

Sergio Escalera, Markus Weimer, Mikhail Burtsev, Valentin Malykh, Varvara Logacheva, Ryan Lowe, Iulian Vlad Serban, Yoshua Bengio, Alexander Rudnicky, Alan W Black, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Łukasz Kidziński, Sharada Prasanna Mohanty, Carmichael F Ong, Jennifer L Hicks, Sergey Levine, Marcel Salathé, Scott Delp, Iker Huerga, Alexander Grigorenko, Leifur Thorbergsson, Anasuya Das, Kyla Nemitz, Jenna Sandker, Stephen King, Alexander S Ecker, Leon A Gatys, Matthias Bethge, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Shi Feng, Pedro Rodriguez, Mohit Iyyer, He He, Hal Daumé, Sean McGregor, Amir Banifatemi, Alexey Kurakin, Ian Goodfellow, Samy Bengio
January, 2018
PDF

Abstract

Competitions have become a popular tool in the data science community to solve hard problems, assess the state of the art and spur new research directions. Companies like Kaggle and open source platforms like Codalab connect people with data and a data science problem to those with the skills and means to solve it. Hence, the question arises: What, if anything, could NIPS add to this rich ecosystem? In 2017, we embarked to find out. We attracted 23 potential competitions, of which we selected five to be NIPS 2017 competitions. Our final selection features competitions advancing the state of the art in other sciences such as “Classifying Clinically Actionable Genetic Mutations” and “Learning to Run”. Others, like “The Conversational Intelligence Challenge” and “Adversarial Attacks and Defences” generated new data sets that we expect to impact the progress in their respective communities for …

Matthias Bethge
Matthias Bethge
Professor for Computational Neuroscience and Machine Learning & Director of the Tübingen AI Center

Matthias Bethge is Professor for Computational Neuroscience and Machine Learning at the University of Tübingen and director of the Tübingen AI Center, a joint center between Tübingen University and MPI for Intelligent Systems that is part of the German AI strategy.