Call for High School Projects
Machine Learning for Social Impact
The Thirty-Eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024) is an interdisciplinary conference that brings together researchers in machine learning, neuroscience, statistics, optimization, computer vision, natural language processing, life sciences, natural sciences, social sciences, and other adjacent fields.
This year, we invite high school students to submit research papers on the topic of machine learning for social impact. A subset of finalists will be selected to present their projects virtually and will have their work spotlighted on the NeurIPS homepage. In addition, the leading authors of up to five winning projects will be invited to attend an award ceremony at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver.
Each submission must describe independent work wholly performed by the high school student authors. We expect each submission to highlight either demonstrated positive social impact or the potential for positive social impact using machine learning. Application areas may include but are not limited to the following:
- Agriculture
- Climate change
- Education
- Healthcare
- Homelessness
- Hunger
- Food security
- Mental health
- Poverty
- Water quality
Authors will be asked to confirm that their submissions accord with the NeurIPS code of conduct and the NeurIPS code of ethics.
Submission deadline: All submissions must be made by June 27th, 4pm EDT. The system will close after this time, and no further submissions will be possible.
We are using OpenReview to manage submissions. Papers should be submitted here. When registering for a new OpenReview profile, you can type in the name of your high school as the institution and “high school student” as the role. Submission will open June 1st. Submissions under review will be visible only to their assigned program committee. We will not be soliciting comments from the general public during the reviewing process. Anyone who plans to submit a paper as an author or a co-author will need to create (or update) their OpenReview profile by the full paper submission deadline.
Formatting instructions: All submissions must be in PDF format. Submissions are limited to four content pages, including all figures and tables; additional pages containing only references are allowed. You must format your submission using the NeurIPS 2024 HighSchool style file using the “preprint” option for non-anonymous submission. The maximum file size for submissions is 50MB. Submissions that violate the NeurIPS style (e.g., by decreasing margins or font sizes) or page limits may be rejected without further review. Papers may be rejected without consideration of their merits if they fail to meet the submission requirements, as described in this document.
Mentorship and collaboration: The submitted research can be a component of a larger research endeavor involving external collaborators, but the submission should describe only the authors’ contributions. The authors can also have external mentors but must disclose the nature of the mentorship. At the time of submission, the authors will be asked to describe the involvement of any mentors or external collaborators and to distinguish mentor and collaborator contributions from those of the authors. In addition, the authors may (optionally) include an acknowledgements section acknowledging the contributions of others following the content sections of the submission. The acknowledgements section will not count toward the submission page limit.
Proof of high school attendance: Submitting authors will also be asked to upload a signed letter, on school letterhead, from each author’s high school confirming that the author was enrolled in high school during the 2023-2024 academic year.
Supplementary artifacts: In their four content pages, authors may link to supplementary artifacts including videos, working demonstrations, digital posters, websites, or source code. For source code, this can be done by, for example, uploading the code to a free https://github.com/ repository and then including a hyperlink to that repository in the submitted paper. Data files that are not too large can also be uploaded to a GitHub repository, and larger files can be uploaded to a free research data repository like https://dataverse.harvard.edu/. Please do not link to additional text. All such supplementary material should be wholly created by the authors and should directly support the submission content.
Review process: Each submission will be reviewed by anonymous referees. The authors, however, should not be anonymous. No written feedback will be provided to the authors.
Finalist notifications will be sent to authors on September 25.
Use of Large Language Models (LLMs): We welcome authors to use any tool that is suitable for preparing high-quality papers and research. However, we ask authors to keep in mind two important criteria. First, we expect papers to fully describe their methodology. Any tool that is important to that methodology, including the use of LLMs, should be described also. For example, authors should mention tools (including LLMs) that were used for data processing or filtering, visualization, facilitating or running experiments, or proving theorems. It may also be advisable to describe the use of LLMs in implementing the method (if this corresponds to an important, original, or non-standard component of the approach). Second, authors are responsible for the entire content of the paper, including all text and figures, so while authors are welcome to use any tool they wish for writing the paper, they must ensure that all text is correct and original.
Dual submissions: Submissions that are substantially similar to papers that the authors have previously published or submitted in parallel to other peer-reviewed venues with proceedings or journals may not be submitted to NeurIPS. Papers previously presented at workshops or science fairs are permitted, so long as they did not appear in a conference proceedings (e.g., CVPRW proceedings), a journal, or a book. However, submissions will not be published in formal proceedings, so work submitted to this call may be published elsewhere in the future. Plagiarism is prohibited by the NeurIPS Code of Conduct.
Contact: highschool@neurips.cc