Terms and Conditions

Common terms used in these rules

These are the general official rules that govern how contest promotions operate. Such a promotion will be simply referred to as the "contest" or the "challenge" throughout the rest of these rules. In these rules, "organizers", "we", "our", and "us" refer to the NSF HDR Institutes organizing committee and possible other sponsors; "participant", "you", and "yourself" refer to an eligible contest participant; and "challenge website" is used to refer to both the overall challenge website or any of the three individual CodaBench challenge pages.

SECTION 1 Contest Description

This is a skill-based contest and chance plays no part in the determination of the winner(s). The goal of the contest is described on the challenge website. All eligible entries received will be judged using the criteria described on the website to determine winners.

SECTION 2 Contest Schedule

The schedule provided on the challenge website at the beginning of the challenge may be modified by the organizers at any time. The registered participants will be notified by a post on the website of any change in the schedule and will also receive an email. We reserve the right to extend the deadline but not shorten the final deadline of the competition. To that end, they should provide a valid email; this will also be used to notify them should they win the contest.

SECTION 3 Eligibility

You are eligible to enter this contest if you meet the following requirements: (a) You are an individual or a team of people desiring to contribute to the tasks of the challenge and accepting to follow its rules, and (b) You are NOT a resident of any country constrained by US export regulations included in the OFAC sanction page. Therefore, residents of these countries/regions are not eligible to participate; and (c) You are not involved in any part of the administration, preparation, and execution of this contest; and (e) You are not an immediate family (parent, sibling, spouse, or child) or household member of a person involved in any part of the administration and execution of this contest. This contest is void within the geographic area identified above and wherever else prohibited by law. If you choose to submit an entry but are not qualified to enter the contest, this entry is voluntary, and any entry you submit is governed by the remainder of these contest rules; contestant co-organizers reserve the right to use the results for scientific analysis. If you are not qualified to submit a contest entry and still choose to submit one, under no circumstances will such entries qualify for sponsored prizes.

SECTION 4 Entry

To be eligible for judging, an entry must meet the following content/technical requirements: (a) Entry contents: The participants are required to submit entries following the instructions provided on the challenge website. To be part of the final ranking, the participants will be asked to provide a link to a GitHub repository with the code used to train and apply the method. There is no other obligation to publish, unless otherwise specified on the website of the challenge. (b) Prerequisite: Unless specified on the website of the challenge, there is no prerequisite to participate, including no requirement to have participated in previous challenges. (c) Use of data provided: All data provided by the organizers are freely available to the participants from the websites or GitHub repositories of the challenges under license terms provided with the data. Unless and where explicitly allowed by the individual challenge, the use of outside data not provided by the organizers is strictly prohibited. (1) Test data: The organizers will use test data to perform the final evaluation, hence the participants' final entry will be based on test data. The mode of distribution of test data is described on the website of the challenge. (2) Training and validation data: The contest organizers will make available to the participants a training dataset with truth values. A validation set is placed on CodaBench with no public truth values as a means to show scoring. The validation data will be used to show scores of interim submissions on the leaderboard. It will be similar in composition to the final scoring set. (3) Post-challenge analyses: The organizers may also perform additional post-challenge analyses using extra data, but the results will not affect the ranking of the challenge performed with the test data. (d) Submission: The participants' entries will be submitted online via CodaBench, as specified on the challenge's website. During development, the participants will receive immediate feedback on validation data released for practice purposes. The results will be computed automatically on test data submissions for the final evaluation. The performances on test data will not be released until the challenge is over. (e) Original work, permissions: In addition, by submitting your entry into this contest, you confirm that, to the best of your knowledge: (1) Your entry is your own original work; and (2) Your entry only includes material, or that is publicly available under an appropriate open-source license.

SECTION 5 Potential use of entry

Other than what is set forth below, we are not claiming any ownership rights to your entry. However, by submitting your entry, you: (a) make your results and other material available under terms no less permissive than CC BY-NC-SA. All source code must be under an OSI compliant license. (b) Agree to sign any necessary documentation that may be required for us and our designees to make use of the rights you granted above; (c) Understand and acknowledge that sponsors and other entrants may have developed or commissioned materials similar or identical to your submission and you waive any claims you may have resulting from any similarities to your entry; (d) Understand that we cannot control the incoming information you will disclose to our representatives or our co-sponsor's representatives in the course of entering, or what our representatives will remember about your entry. You also understand that we will not restrict work assignments of representatives or our co-sponsor's representatives who have had access to your entry. By entering this contest, you agree that use of information in our representatives' or our co-sponsor's representatives unaided memories in the development or deployment of our products or services does not create liability for us under this agreement or copyright or trade secret law; (e) Understand that you will not receive any compensation or credit for use of your entry, other than what is described in these official rules. If you do not want to grant us these rights to your entry, please do not enter this contest.

SECTION 6 Submission of entries

(a) Follow the instructions on the challenge website to submit entries. The HDR Institutes may use a third party platform to submit and score entries ("submission platform"). (b) Unless otherwise specified on the website of the challenge, the participants will be registered as mutually exclusive teams. Each team may submit only one single final entry. We are not responsible for entries that we do not receive for any reason, or for entries that we receive but are not functioning properly. (c) The participants are also subject to accepting the terms and conditions of the submission platform chosen to submit and score entries. (d) The participants must follow the instructions. We will automatically disqualify incomplete or invalid entries.

SECTION 7 Judging the entries

Entries will be scored through the scoring program made available on each challenge’s respective GitHub repository; all individuals involved in developing this scoring program will be forbidden to enter the contest and will be experts in causality, statistics, machine learning, or a related field, or experts in challenge organization. A list of the developers will be made available upon request. The organizers will review all eligible entries received and select the winners based upon the prediction or challenge score on test data. The organizers will verify that the winners complied with the rules, including that they documented their method by filling out a fact sheet and have published on GitHub (or another openly available code-hosting platform) their training scripts, model weights, and all associated material under an OSI-approved license. The decisions of the organizers are final and binding. The distribution of prizes according to the decisions made by the organizers will be made within three (3) months after completion of the last round of the contest. If we do not receive a sufficient number of entries meeting the entry requirements, we may, at our discretion based on the above criteria, not award any or all of the contest prizes below. In the event of a tie between any eligible entries, the tie will be broken by giving preference to the earliest submission, using the time stamp of the submission platform.

SECTION 8 Prizes and Awards

Prizes for this contest are being arranged and will consist of donations/prizes from listed sponsors. Preparation for this challenge has come through the support of the NSF Harnessing the Data Revolution award. (a) Prizes as described on the website of the challenge will be awarded as incentive prizes to boost contest participation; these prizes will not require participants to enter into an IP agreement with the organizers/sponsors, to disclose algorithms, or to deliver source code to the organizers. However, unless otherwise specified on the challenge website, to be eligible for prizes, the top ranking participants are required to publicly release their code, as per Section 5, under an OSI-approved open-source license. Additionally, it is strongly recommended that participants deposit all code, methods, and algorithms in suitable digital archives such as Zenodo, arXiv, etc; otherwise code may be archived on participants’ behalf. (b) Travel awards: In addition to prizes, the organizers may distribute travel awards according to merit and need. If travel awards are available, the modalities of application will be specified on the website of the challenge. The travel awards may be used for workshops organized in conjunction with the challenge. The award money will be granted in reimbursement of expenses including airfare, ground transportation, hotel, or workshop registration. Reimbursement is conditioned on (i) attending the workshop, (ii) making an oral presentation of the methods used in the challenge, and (iii) presenting original receipts. (c) If for any reason the advertised prizes are unavailable, unless to do so would be prohibited by law, we reserve the right to substitute a prize(s) of equal or greater value, as permitted. We will only award one prize per team. If you are selected as a potential winner of this contest: (1) If your prize is not in cash, you may not exchange your prize for cash; you may not exchange any prize for other merchandise or services. (2) You may not designate someone else as the winner. If you are unable or unwilling to accept your prize, we will award it to an alternate potential winner. (3) If you accept a prize, you will be solely responsible for all applicable taxes related to accepting the prize. (4) If you are a minor in your place of residence, we may award the prize to your parent/legal guardian on your behalf and your parent/legal guardian will be designated as the winner.

SECTION 9 Other Sponsored Events

(1) To stimulate participation, the organizers are making available several channels for scientific paper publication. Publishing papers is optional and will not be a condition to entering the challenge or winning prizes. (2) The results of the challenge will be published in a white paper, online in arXiv. The organizers may make additional publication arrangements that will be specified on the website of the challenge. The organizers may also sponsor other events to stimulate participation. See the website of the challenge.

SECTION 10 Notifications

If there is any change to data, schedule, instructions of participation, or these rules, the registered participants will be notified at the email they provided with the registration. If you are a potential winner, we will notify you by sending a message to the email address listed on your final entry within seven days following the determination of winners. If the notification that we send is returned as undeliverable, or you are otherwise unreachable for any reason, we may award the prize to an alternate winner, unless forbidden by applicable law. Winners who have entered the contest as a team will be responsible to share any prize among their members. The prize will be delivered to the registered team leader. If this person becomes unavailable for any reason, the prize will be delivered to be the authorized account holder of the email address used to make the winning entry. If you are a potential winner, we may require you to sign a declaration of eligibility, use, indemnity and liability/publicity release and applicable tax forms. If you are a potential winner and are a minor in your place of residence, and we require that your parent or legal guardian will be designated as the winner, and we may require that they sign a declaration of eligibility, use, indemnity and liability/publicity release on your behalf. If you, (or your parent/legal guardian if applicable), do not sign and return these required forms within the time period listed on the winner notification message, we may disqualify you (or the designated parent/legal guardian) and select an alternate selected winner.

SECTION 11 Online notification

We will post changes in the rules or changes in the data as well as the names of confirmed winners (after contest decisions are made by the organizers) online on the website of the challenge. This list will remain posted for one year or will be made available upon request by sending an email to the email listed on the appropriate CodaBench challenge page.

SECTION 12 Conditions

By entering this contest you agree: (a) To abide by these official rules; (b) To the extent allowable under applicable law, to release and hold harmless the organizers and other sponsors, their respective parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, employees and agents from any and all liability or any injury, loss, damage, right, claim or action of any kind arising from or in connection with this contest or any prize won save for residents of the United Kingdom, Chile, Korea, Greece, Brazil, Turkey, Hong Kong, France and Germany with respect to claims resulting from death or personal injury arising from the organizers’ and other sponsors' negligence, for residents of the United Kingdom with respect to claims resulting from the tort of deceit or any other liabilities that may not be excluded by law, and for residents of Australia in respect of any implied condition or warranty the exclusion of which from these official rules would contravene any statute or cause any part of these official rules to be void; (c) That the organizers’ decisions will be final and binding on all matters related to this contest; and (d) That by accepting a prize, the organizers and other sponsors may use your team name, your name, and your place of residence online and in print, or in any other media, in connection with this contest, without payment or compensation to you. The declaration of eligibility, use, indemnity and liability/publicity release provided to the potential winner will make reference to obtaining their free consent to use their name and place of residence. In any case, the lack of such consent does not prevent the winner from receiving the prize. (e) This contest will be governed by the laws of the state of California, and you consent to the exclusive jurisdiction and venue of the courts of the state of California for any disputes arising out of this contest. For residents of Austria only: you may withdraw your submission from this contest within seven days of your entry. If you withdraw within seven days of entry, your submission will be returned to you, and we will not make any use of your submission in the future. However, you will not be eligible to win a prize. If you do not withdraw within seven days of entry, you will be bound by the provisions of these official rules. For residents of the United Kingdom only: the provisions of the contracts (rights of third parties) act 1999 will not apply to this agreement. For residents of New Zealand only: the provisions of the contracts (privity) act of 1982 will not apply to this agreement. For Quebec residents: any litigation respecting the conduct or organization of a publicity contest may be submitted to the Regie des Alcools, des Courses et des Jeux for ruling. Any litigation respecting the awarding of a prize may be submitted to the Regie only for the purpose of helping the parties reach a settlement. For residents of Israel only: this agreement does not entitle third parties to benefits under this agreement as defined in Chapter "D" of the Contracts Act (General Part), 1973.

SECTION 13 Unforeseen event

If an unforeseen or unexpected event (including, but not limited to: someone cheating; a virus, bug, or catastrophic event corrupting data or the submission platform; someone discovering a flaw in the data or modalities of the challenge; very low participation in the challenge) that cannot be reasonably anticipated or controlled, (also referred to as force majeure) affects the fairness and / or integrity of this contest, we reserve the right to cancel, change or suspend this contest. This right is reserved whether the event is due to human or technical error. If a solution cannot be found to restore the integrity of the contest, we reserve the right to select winners based on the criteria specified above from among all eligible entries received before we had to cancel, change or suspend the contest subject to obtaining the approval from the Regie des Alcools, des Courses et des Jeux with respect to the province of Quebec. Computer "hacking" is unlawful. If you attempt to compromise the integrity or the legitimate operation of this contest by hacking or by cheating or committing fraud in any way, we may seek damages from you to the fullest extent permitted by law. Further, we may ban you from participating in any of our future contests, so please play fairly.