Section: Research Program

Organisation of Challenges

Participants: Cécile Germain, Isabelle Guyon, Marc Schoenauer, Michèle Sebag

Challenges have been an important drive for Machine Learning research for many years, and TAO members have played important roles in the organization of many such challenges: Michèle Sebag was head of the challenge programme in the Pascal European Network of Excellence (2005-2013); Isabelle Guyon, as mentioned, was the PI of many challenges ranging from causation challenges [104], to AutoML  [105]. The Higgs challenge  [65], most attended ever Kaggle challenge, was jointly organized by TAO (C. Germain), LAL-IN2P3 (D. Rousseau and B. Kegl) and I. Guyon (not yet at TAO), in collaboration with CERN and Imperial College.

TAU was also particularly implicated with the ChaLearn Looking At People (LAP) challenge series in Computer Vision, in collaboration with the University of Barcelona  [90] including the Job Candidate Screening Coopetition  [89]; the Real Versus Fake Expressed Emotion Challenge (ICCV 2017)  [155]; the Large-scale Continuous Gesture Recognition Challenge (ICCV 2017)  [155]; the Large-scale Isolated Gesture Recognition Challenge (ICCV 2017)  [155].

Other challenges have been organized in 2018, or are planned for the near future, detailed in Section 7.6. In particular, many of them now run on the Codalab platform, managed by TAU and maintained at LRI.