Call for KDD Cup Proposals

Since its inception in 1997, the KDD Cup, held in conjunction with the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, has stood as the premier annual Data Mining competition. We invite industrial, academic institutions, and non-profit organizations to contribute to this legacy by submitting proposals for organizing the 2024 KDD Cup competition. The KDD Cup competition is anticipated to last for 3 months, and the winners will be honored at the KDD conference opening ceremony and will present their solutions at the KDD Cup workshop during the conference.

We invite submissions for robust and innovative proposals that meet the following requirements:

  1. A novel and motivated problem: We seek proposals that present tasks addressing unique, real-world challenges. These should be distinct from conventional machine learning problems faced in recent years.  Your proposal should include a dedicated section explaining how the problem you’re presenting will stimulate new research avenues and contribute to advancements in the field.
  2. A Rigorous and Fair Setup: It’s imperative that organizers ensure data availability and protect the confidentiality of the test set (to prevent information leakage). Evaluation metrics must be both relevant and statistically robust, facilitating objective comparisons. Proposals should establish a baseline performance, indicating the potential for meaningful advancements. An estimate of what constitutes a significant difference in the performance will be much appreciated. Additionally, we are interested in evaluations that correlate machine learning performance with tangible real-world impact, including suggestions on how winning solutions might be applied in practical scenarios.
  3. A Challenging yet Manageable Task: The competition should be sufficiently challenging in the sense that there is enough room for improvement from the basic solutions, and novel ideas are required to succeed in the competition. The task should be manageable in about 3 months’ time, striking a balance between complexity and achievability.
  4. Accessibility: The competition should be approachable for a wide range of participants, including those without extensive domain knowledge or access to a significant computational infrastructure. Your proposal should detail how it will make the competition accessible and inclusive, possibly through simplifying domain-specific complexities.
  5. Comprehensive Proposal Details: We expect detailed proposals covering all crucial aspects like key dates, submission processes, result evaluation methods, and clear rules of the competition. As a rule of thumb, prepare a proposal as close as possible to the version you would publish on the competition’s webpage.

Key Dates

Requirements

Please follow the following template for your proposal submission:

  1. Problem description: Describe the problem. Justify why this is an important and novel problem. In particular, please elaborate how your proposed problem is different from the previous competitions in recent years. Additionally, please include a discussion of the broader impact of this problem. Please prepare some data samples or scenarios of your proposed problem. If you plan to include more than one track, please describe the unique value for each track.
  2. Evaluation: Describe how you plan to evaluate the submission. We encourage you to think about how the evaluation aligns with real-world impact. We are particularly interested if additional evaluation on the winning submissions can be conducted in the real world after the competition.
  3. Timeline: Start of the competition (website setup, datasets release, leaderboard setup), user registration deadline, submission deadline, and notification. You can consider two rounds of submissions if suitable.
  4. Awards: We encourage you to think about awards beyond the money prize.
  5. Implementation Details:
    • Competition infrastructure. Which competition infrastructure do you plan to use (e.g., Kaggle, or your own)? Is the competition platform you chose equally accessible to participants all over the world?
    • Team work. Explain how the host will organize a team dedicated to the KDD Cup. For each team member, please include a list of their roles, responsibilities, and their commitment.
    • Are there any privacy concerns for the released data? Have you obtained the rights to release the data for the competition from your legal counsels? What type of report, presentation, code do you require to submit for the final winning solutions?
    • How would you handle Q&A and possible revisions during the competition?
    • To which extent you have explored this problem and what is the baseline solution?
    • How do you plan to promote the competition?
    • What is your plan to enhance diversity of the participants and encourage participation of a diverse group of competitors?
  6. Host information:
    • Names, affiliations, email addresses, phone numbers, and short biographies of the organizers.

Selection priority will be given to innovative datasets and problems, and proposals with a specific plan to promote a diversity of participants.

Please keep the proposal concise and strictly confidential. Please send your proposals in the PDF format to kdd24-cup-chairs@acm.org by the submission deadline, and follow the updates provided on the KDD website.

Thank you for your participation.

– KDD Cup 2024 Chairs