CiML 2018 - Machine Learning competitions "in the wild": Playing in the real world or in real time

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.