News

ANNOUNCEMENT: The Second Annual NIPS Unlabeled Data Competition and Workshop It's time to put-up or shut-up!

We are pleased to announce the NIPS*2001 Unlabeled Data Competition and Workshop, to be held in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada, Dec 7 or 8, 2001. This competition is a challenge to the machine learning community to develop and demonstrate methods to use unlabeled data to improve supervised learning. We have created a web-site where participants can download and submit problem sets and compete head to head with other contestants in a series of challenging unlabeled-data, supervised-learning problems.

Recently, there has been much interest in applying techniques that incorporate knowledge from unlabeled data into systems performing supervised learning. The potential advantages of such techniques are obvious in domains where labeled data is expensive and unlabeled data is cheap. Many such techniques have been proposed, but only recently has any effort been made to compare the effectiveness of different approaches on real world problems.

Our contest presents a challenge to the proponents of methods to incorporate unlabeled data into supervised learning. Can you really use unlabeled data to help train a supervised classification (or regression) system? Do recent (and not so recent) theories stand up to the data test?

On the contest web-site you can find challenge problems where you can try out your methods head-to-head against anyone brave enough to face you. Then, at the end of the contest we will release the results and find out who really knows something about using unlabeled data, and if unlabeled data are really useful or we are all just wasting our time. So ask yourself, are you (and your theory) up to the challenge?? Feeling lucky???

For more details on the competition or the workshop and to sign up for the Unlabeled Data Mailing List, please visit our web-page at http://q.cis.uoguelph.ca/~skremer/NIPS2001/

Stefan