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Workshop
CiML 2018 - Machine Learning competitions "in the wild": Playing in the real world or in real time
Isabelle Guyon · Evelyne Viegas · Sergio Escalera · Jacob D Abernethy

Sat Dec 08 05:00 AM -- 03:30 PM (PST) @ Room 511 ABDE
Event URL: http://ciml.chalearn.org/ »

Challenges in machine learning and data science are competitions running over several weeks or months to resolve problems using provided datasets or simulated environments. The playful nature of challenges naturally attracts students, making challenge a great teaching resource. For this fifth edition of the CiML workshop at NIPS we want to go beyond simple data science challenges using canned data. We will explore the possibilities offered by challenges in which code submitted by participants are evaluated "in the wild", directly interacting in real time with users or with real or simulated systems. Organizing challenges "in the wild" is not new. One of the most impactful such challenge organized relatively recently is the DARPA grant challenge 2005 on autonomous navigation, which accelerated research on autonomous vehicles, leading to self-driving cars. Other high profile challenge series with live competitions include RoboCup, which has been running from the past 22 years. Recently, the machine learning community has started being interested in such interactive challenges, with last year at NIPS the learning to run challenge, an reinforcement learning challenge in which a human avatar had to be controlled with simulated muscular contractions, and the ChatBot challenge in which humans and robots had to engage into an intelligent conversation. Applications are countless for machine learning and artificial intelligence programs to solve problems in real time in the real world, by interacting with the environment. But organizing such challenges is far from trivial
The workshop will give a large part to discussions around two principal axes: (1) Design principles and implementation issues; (2) Opportunities to organize new impactful challenges.
Our objectives include bringing together potential partner to organize new such challenges and stimulating "machine learning for good", i.e. the organization of challenges for the benefit of society.
CiML is a forum that brings together workshop organizers, platform providers, and participants to discuss best practices in challenge organization and new methods and application opportunities to design high impact challenges. Following the success of previous years' workshops, we propose to reconvene and discuss new opportunities for challenges "in the wild", one of the hottest topics in challenge organization. We have invited prominent speakers having experience in this domain.
The audience of this workshop is targeted to workshop organizers, participants, and anyone with scientific problem involving machine learning, which may be formulated as a challenge. The emphasis of the workshop is on challenge design. Hence it complements nicely the workshop on the NIPS 2018 competition track and will help paving the way toward next year's competition program.
Submit abstract (up to 2 pages) before October 10 by sending email to nips2018@chalearn.org. See http://ciml.chalearn.org/ciml2018#CALL.

Author Information

Isabelle Guyon (U. Paris-Saclay & ChaLearn)
Evelyne Viegas (Microsoft Research)
Sergio Escalera (University of Barcelona and Computer Vision Center)

Sergio Escalera obtained the P.h.D. degree on Multi-class visual categorization systems at Computer Vision Center, UAB. He obtained the 2008 best Thesis award on Computer Science at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He leads the Human Pose Recovery and Behavior Analysis Group at UB, CVC, and the Barcelona Graduate School of Mathematics. He is an associate professor at the Department of Mathematics and Informatics, Universitat de Barcelona. He is an adjunct professor at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Aalborg University, and Dalhousie University. He has been visiting professor at TU Delft and Aalborg Universities. He is a member of the Visual and Computational Learning consolidated research group of Catalonia. He is also a member of the Computer Vision Center at Campus UAB. He is Editor-in-Chief of American Journal of Intelligent Systems and editorial board member of more than 5 international journals. He is advisor, director, and vice-president of ChaLearn Challenges in Machine Learning, leading ChaLearn Looking at People events. He is co-founder of PhysicalTech and Care Respite companies. He is also member of the AERFAI Spanish Association on Pattern Recognition, ACIA Catalan Association of Artificial Intelligence, and he is vice-chair of IAPR TC-12: Multimedia and visual information systems. He has different patents and registered models. He has published more than 150 research papers and participated in the organization of scientific events, including CCIA04, CCIA14, ICCV11, AMDO2016, FG2017, and workshops at ICCV11, ICMI13, ECCV14, CVPR15, ICCV15, CVPR16, ECCV16, ICPR16, NIPS16. He has been guest editor at JMLR, TPAMI, IJCV, TAC, and Neural Comp. and App. He has been area chair at WACV16, NIPS16, and FG17. His research interests include, between others, statistical pattern recognition, visual object recognition, and HCI systems, with special interest in human pose recovery and behavior analysis from multi-modal data.

Jacob D Abernethy (University of Michigan)

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