IJCAI 2021 Call for Competitions


We invite proposals for Competitions and Challenges of the 30th International Joint
Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2021), which is planned to be held in
Montreal, Canada, from August 21st to August 26th, 2021. We solicit competition
proposals on any topic of interest to the artificial intelligence (AI) community.

Proposal submission

Competition proposals must be submitted via CMT at:
https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/IJCAICC2021
Each submitted proposal needs to include the following information.

  1. Contact information: Please provide the organizers’ name, phone numbers and
    email addresses. In addition, if the organizers use Skype or have other of
    means of contact, please provide the related information (e.g., Skype ID). .
  2. The proposed competition or challenge: Please describe the overall goal of the
    challenge or competition. Which subfields of AI are needed to solve the
    challenge or win the competition? If you have created a website for your
    competition / challenge, please provide the URL.
  3. Prizes of the proposed competition or challenge: Do you plan to provide prizes
    for winners (and runner-ups)? If so, what is the form of the prizes (gift card,
    trophy, small gifts or others)? What is the expected amount of money needed to
    prepare the prizes? Where will you get that money from and how certain or
    risky is it to get that money?
  4. Source code: How will other researchers and society in general benefit from
    your competition / challenge? In particular, what is your plan on sharing the
    source code of participants? Will it be shared with other participants? Will it be
    open sourced or conditionally open sourced with a certain type of license
    (please specify the license)?
  5. Timeline in milestones: Please describe the detailed timeline of running this
    competition or challenge, including but not limited to
    a. When will you send “Call for Participation” out
    b. When will be the submission deadline for the competition or challenge.
    c. How many phases are there in the competition or challenge? If there are
    more than one phase, when will be the submission deadlines for each phase..
    d. When will you notify the participants?
  1. Postproceedings / publications: We are considering to organize peer-reviewed
    post-proceedings publications for papers about the most interesting agents /
    algorithms / techniques developed for the competitions and challenges run at
    IJCAI, as well as for one paper per competition or challenge that describes the
    lessons learnt from running the competition / challenge. Note that some
    failures are just as interesting as winning strategies. Would you like to
    participate in postproceedings? If yes, How many reviewers can you provide?
  2. Participants: How many teams do you expect to participate? How certain are
    you of that? How many teams do you expect to come to IJCAI if it is held
    physically?
  3. During the Conference: Please indicate the resources you will need during the
    conference. Specifically, please provide the bare minimum you need as well as
    modest “nice to have” for each of the following types of resources. The
    evaluation of the proposal will take into account the minimum requirements
    you provide. Once we accept your proposal we will allocate the resources as
    fairly as we can over all accepted competitions/challenges.
    a. Floor space in square meters (minimum & nice to have)?
    b. Number of beamers with screens required (minimum & nice to have)?
    c. Number of monitors required (minimum & nice to have)?
    d. Number of tables (minimum & nice to have)?
    e. Number of chairs (minimum & nice to have)?
    f. Number of electricity sockets and watts (minimum & nice to have)?
    g. Wifi accessibility (must-have or nice-to-have)? Note that this is extremely
    costly and cannot be guaranteed
    h. Private space (must-have or nice-to-have)? In other words, can your
    competition or challenge be held in open space, e.g., the lobby?
  4. Virtual Conference: If the conference has to be held virtually (fully online), will
    this affect your completion or challenge?
  5. Any other information that you think we need to know.
    You may refer to the IJCAI 2020 accepted competitions/challenges as examples

Competitions

Important Dates

Competition or Challenge proposal submission deadline: February 22, 2021
Acceptance notification: March 22, 2021
Deadlines are 23:59 Pacific Time (PST/PDT) for all dates

Comptetiton Chair

For any questions on this, please contact the Competitions and Challenges track chairs
Fei Fang (feif@cs.cmu.edu) and Sinno Jialin Pan (sinnopan@ntu.edu.sg)