CALL FOR COMPETITIONS

We are pleased to announce that FUSION 2024 will host competitions for the first time, consisting of a challenging information fusion problem that must be solved on a dataset or in a computational environment provided by the competition organizers based on a-priori-defined evaluation metrics or criteria.

Competitions have significantly spurred progress in related research fields, such as machine learning, by allowing researchers to focus on the algorithmic problem solution, relieving them from the upfront data collection task, and systematically assessing their solutions in a standardized, comparable, and clearly framed evaluation setting. For competition organizers, competitions offer a prime opportunity of attracting a vast talent pool to their problem to receive innovative, cutting-edge solutions. Hence, by introducing a dedicated competitions track, FUSION 2024 will provide a dedicated forum to bring together groups facing a challenging problem with the FUSION community’s creative innovation spirit and research expertise.

We are thus soliciting proposals for competitions, which should consist of a clearly defined problem statement requiring information fusion for its resolution. We explicitly encourage proposals across the whole spectrum of information fusion and application fields, from low-level fusion (e.g., tracking for autonomous vehicles or drones) to high-level fusion (e.g., human-in-the-loop fusion – incorporating human input and feedback into the fusion process, information fusion for decision support, natural language processing/soft fusion) and cross-cutting problems, as well as application-oriented problems (e.g., multi-modal information fusion for robotics).

Competition organizers can propose their timelines for running their competition, but competitors should provide results by Feb. 15, 2024 to impact the summary analysis paper. Please note that competition organizers must at least submit a paper — which will be peer-reviewed as any other — to the FUSION 2024 competitions track, which shall:

1. introduce the challenge to be solved in the competition, e.g., presenting the problem, the provided dataset, the chosen evaluation metrics together with their rationale, and the eventual proposed “baseline” approach (or approaches), which defines the state-of-the-art performance that submitting teams seek to outperform;
2. provide an analysis of the competition, e.g., how many submitting teams, a comparative analysis of their submitted results/achieved performance;
3. any “lessons learned” that potentially could be gleaned, e.g., which techniques/approaches have been particularly or less successful and why.

Such summary analysis paper can be submitted with the joint authorship of all teams submitting a solution to the competition, or be not, as the organizers see fit. Teams submitting a solution to a competition are encouraged to submit a regular paper describing their approach to FUSION 2024. Accepted papers will be published in the proceedings. At least one of each paper’s authors will have to register and attend the conference in person.

Successful competitions will be presented in a dedicated session at the conference, where the organizers will introduce the challenge and the teams will describe their solutions.