Sequence Prediction Challenge (SPICE) -- Call for Participation

[Borja Balle Pigem]

[Apologies for cross-posting]


The Sequence PredIction ChallengE (SPiCe, http://spice.lif.univ-mrs.fr/) is on and will last until the end of July! The goal of this competition is to guess the next symbol in a sequence, given a set of complete sequences for training.

Datasets come from different fields, from Natural Language Processing to Bioinformatics, including User Modelling, Software Testing, and even Sport Scooting! But we will not tell you which one is coming from where, this would be too easy… There are also synthetically generated data that have the same characteristics than the ones coming from the real-world. The size of training samples varies from 20,000 to 1 million sequences.

To participate, you will find on the website of the competition (http://spice.lif.univ-mrs.fr/) training data for 20 different problems. Once you have learned your model for a problem, you provide predictions for the most likely next symbols for a set of test sequences (more information on the website). To help you get started, a python implementation of the API and baselines based on spectral learning and 3-grams are available on the competition website.

All participants will be encouraged to submit a short paper to the International Conference in Grammatical Inference (ICGI, http://icgi2016.tudelft.nl/) that will be held in Delft, The Netherlands, from 5th to 7th October 2016. The winners will also be invited to submit a paper to the journal special issue that will follow. Cash prizes for top performers will be announced shortly, stay tuned!

** Important Dates **

- April. 2016 : Beginning of the competition

- End of July, 2016 : The competition ends, the results are announced.

- End of August, 2016 : The short papers from the active participants are due.

- October 5-7, 2016 : A special session takes place at ICGI 2016.

- Winter 2016-2017 : The winner(s) is (are) expected to submit a paper to the journal special issue that will follow the ICGI 2016 conference

** Organization Committee **

Borja Balle, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
Rémi Eyraud, Aix-Marseille Université, France
Franco Luque, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and CONICET, Argentina
Ariadna Quattoni, Xerox Research Center Europe, France
Sicco Verwer, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

** Scientific Committee **

Marc G. Bellemare, Google DeepMind, United Kingdom
Xavier Carreras, Xerox Research Center Europe, France
Alexander Clark, King's College London, United Kingdom
François Denis, Aix-Marseille Université, France
Colin de la Higuera, University of Nantes, France
Daniil Ryabko, INRIA Lille, France
Neil Walkinshaw, University of Leicester, United Kingdom
Menno van Zaanen, Tilburg University, The Netherlands

** Contact **

Please feel free to contact us at <spice201...@gmail.com>