The ZULU Active Learning Competition

participants are to build algorithms that can learn deterministic finite automata (DFA) by making the smallest number of membership queries to the server/oracle.

Date: May 03, 2010

The ZULU Competition

Supported by Pascal 2 Network of Excellence

Zulu is an active learning competition, where participants are to build algorithms that can learn deterministic finite automata (DFA) by making the smallest number of membership queries to the server/oracle.

As a web platform ( labh-curien.univ-st-etienne.fr/zulu/ ), Zulu allows users to generate tasks, to interact with the Oracle in learning sessions and to record the results of the users.

The users are provided with:

a baseline algorithm written in JAVA and/or
the elements allowing to build from scratch a new learning algorithm capable of interacting with the server.

The baseline is a variation of Algorithm L* with some sampling done to simulate equivalence queries. As a starting point, the users can therefore play with some simple JAVA code, and easily explore all aspects of Zulu.

Schedule:

Now: Zulu platform is open, anyone may register, develop and test their algorithms
June 1st: Official beginning of the competition
June 30th: Deadline for scoring, submissions closed
July 7th: Notifications of the results
July 15th: Deadline for submission of abstracts to the workshop
September 13-16th: workshop at ICGI (in Valencia, Spain, September 13-16, 2010, users.dsic.upv.es/workshops/icgi2010/ )

Prizes and publications:

The winner of the Zulu competition will receive a prize of 1000€ Participants are encouraged to present their innovations as extended abstracts to the Zulu workshop that will be organised during ICGI. A journal special issue will also be considered.

In Zulu, the goal is to optimise the learning by trying to minimize the number of queries for a given task.

For more information, visit labh-curien.univ-st-etienne.fr/zulu/