Talk:Competitions

From Health of Conferences Committee

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Starting Comments

Many groups talked about competitions. The committee thought that it was important that the competition by decided by an objective measure, not a beauty contest that could leave many irritated. The Architecture community, for example, recently had a branch prediction competition decided by testing branch predictors on traces not provided while competitors were developing their entries.

SIGKDD

We introduced KDD Cup whose goal was to provide competition which would practically evaluate many approaches to the same problem.

DAC

DAC has a student design contest, with the best submissions going to the technical program.

SIGecom

The annual Trading Agent Competition is an open-invitation international event in which researchers test ideas about trading strategy in several market games. This typically includes a final tournament held in conjunction with a technical conference (ACM EC-01, AAMAS-04, AAMAS-06, other non-ACM conferences). This provides an intensive interchange among the participants, and general awareness/exposure among the broader technical community. EC-06 is hosting a related competition, on bidding in sponsored search keyword auctions.

Discussion Begins