The high level task of this challenge is: given any research field, like Machine Learning, Data Mining, etc., rank the most influential institutions, like CMU, UIUC, etc., using any publicly available information such as Microsoft Academic Graph. However, for the purpose of a competition, a faithful evaluation metric is required. We thus transform this task into another innovative and interesting task: given any upcoming top conferences such as KDD, SIGIR, and ICML in 2016, rank the importance of institutions based on predicting how many of their papers will be accepted.

The participants are expected to utilize any information on the Web, including the heterogeneous information in the Microsoft Academic Graph, for predicting next year’s top institutions. Take KDD as an example, the information that is helpful in the ranking might include but not be limited to:

1. Previous years’ KDD top institutions
2. Topic trends of previous years’ KDD papers.
3. Previous years’ KDD top authors’ impact factor based on the citation graph.
4. Location of each year’s KDD since institutions close to the location may have more appearances.
5. Information from other conferences and journals that are related to KDD, like ICDM, ICML, WWW, CIKM, TKDD, etc.
6. Co-author factor.
7. Temporal information associated.

This year’s KDD Cup is novel and challenging in several aspects:

1. The problem itself is an open problem, and the teams do not necessarily have to utilize the supervised learning algorithms;
2. The evaluation setting is significantly different from previous KDD Cup challenges because the ground truth is not known beforehand, which makes the problem even more challenging;
3. The teams are encouraged to use a publicly available dataset to derive knowledge and insights.

 

Conference Full Names

SIGIR: International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
SIGMOD: ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data
SIGCOMM: ACM SIGCOMM Annual Conference on Data Communication
KDD: ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
ICML: International Conference on Machine Learning
FSE: ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
MobiCom: The Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
MM: ACM international conference on Multimedia