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Spock (http://www.spock.com/), a search application for people based in Silicon Valley, is announcing the launch of The Spock Challenge. Spock has selected one of its most interesting problems, namely Entity Resolution, to share with the technical community, allowing other leading computer scientists and engineers to compete in an open contest . The winners of this global competition will reap a reward of $50,000 cash. Spock will also be issuing prizes for 2nd and 3rd place.

The crux of the Entity Resolution problem is clustering web documents accurately. For example, how do you programmatically determine whether a web document about Michael Jackson describes the singer, or the football player? In order to constrain the problem so that it can be successfully solved by an individual or a small team, Spock is providing real world data with ground truth annotations. This data contains 100,000 documents about people, and the challenge is to determine all the distinct people described in the data set. This data can be your training set. Once you�ve got your basic algorithm working against the training set, Spock will let you further tune your code by running it against a second test data set.

Participants can compete in the challenge individually or in teams. The competition will last 4 months and a leader board will be set up so that participants can submit their program and see how they rank compared to other submissions.

More details can be found at http://challenge.spock.com .

To contact Spock, e-mail info@corp.spock.com

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