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The Challenge
The USPTO is inviting software developers, academics, and the TopCoder community to develop specialized algorithms to help bring the seven million patents presently in the patent archive into the digital age. The contest will require advanced knowledge of text recognition, image analysis, and the construction of bounding boxes.
The Contest
In this contest all participants will compete in teams of two, working together over the course of one month to develop solutions and deliver an algorithm that can automatically identify and locate specific elements within patent documents. This experimental contest format is part of TopCoder's ongoing partnership with the Harvard-NASA Tournament lab to better understand how contests can be used to solve complex computational problems in the US federal government. More details as well as a training dataset of approximately 200 manually labeled patents will be made available at the start of the contest. Code submissions will be scored automatically.
Important: To participate, entrants are required to register for the contest between 11/30/2011 and 12/05/2011.
Up to $50,000 total prizes will be distributed to contest winners.
Read more.