[DMANET] 1st Competition on Applied Text Searching CATS'2014 - CALL FORTASKS

FIRST COMPETITION ON APPLIED TEXT SEARCHING, CATS'2014 - CALL FOR TASKS
http://www.cats-series.org


The CATS committee cordially invites proposals for tasks to be run as part of the "Competition on Applied Text Searching 2014 (CATS'14)", which is intended to be an ongoing series of evaluations of text searching algorithms. The main goal of the CATS series is to explore the potentialities of the most recent advances in text searching on real world problems. We particularly aim to provide a fruitful platform, where the practical demands would be better sensed by the academia, and the advances in algorithm design and engineering would be more apparent to the industry.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: DECEMBER 1 2013
CALL FOR TASKS IN A PDF FILE: http://www.cats-series.org/CATS14-CallForTasks.pdf

COMPETITION TASKS
Tasks are typically focused on the design and implementation of efficient, correct algorithms, in the field of text searching, including exact, approximate, single and multiple strings. Any problem definitions extending these fundamental topics as well as introducing new concepts or dimensions are surely very welcome. We especiallyencourage tasks on diverse data sets that are relevant in (but not restricted to) searching biological/DNA sequences, musical sequences, binary data, encrypted texts, natural language texts, compressed data, numerical sequences, dictionaries, images, specialized texts, etc. Tasks based on purely theoretical or open-ended problems, i.e., tasks that do not necessarily have a known efficient or optimal solution may also be considered. In typical setting, the tasks are expected to evaluate solutions in terms of correctness and speed (CPU running times). However, tasks with alternative measures of solution effectiveness other than CPU time consumption w!
ill be also taken into account. It will help us a lot if tasks are designed in such a way that they can be run and scored automatically from a central website or from a freely available tool. We will be happy to help with task design, data formatting, and so on. Task proposals must be submitted in English and must include an email address and information on the task author(s) including name, affiliation, and country.
To ensure a fair and interesting competition for all participants, proposed tasks should ideally contain:

1. Abstract
The abstract will contain a short description of the task and of the data which will be used for the evaluation.

2. Introduction and Motivation
This section will present an introduction to the problem containing some historical informations and the most significant references. It will include also applications and motivations of the problem proposed in the task.

3. Task Description
This section will present a detailed description and a formal definition of the problem involved in the proposed task. It will include technical details about input and output data.

4. Evaluation Procedure and Environment
This section will describe very clearly the procedure to evaluate the submitted solutions. It is expected that all submissions for the task will be checked for correctness and then compared in terms of speed via an automatic system. The proposers may consider to use the smart research tool (http://www.dmi.unict.it/~faro/smart), which is a platform to automatically score and compare string matching algorithms. It might be also possible, and we will be happy, to extent and tune the smart tool according to the needs of the tasks. However, the proposers are surely free to offer their own evaluation procedure with their own tools according to their specific needs. It is also vital to announce the details of the computing device that will be used throughout the evaluation, such as the CPU information, memory, operating system, or any other task specific properties.

5. Data Format
This section will explain the data format which will beused for the evaluation, and the description of the textand of the set of patterns.

6. Basic Solution
While not strictly required, it is strongly preferred that the submission also includes at least one implementation of the desired solution, attached as a separate file. It will be considered as the basic solution to be outperformed in the final evaluations process.

7. Reward Proposal
Although not mandatory, we strongly suggest the task authors to offer a reward for the winner, which will help to receive more attention to the specific task. In this case description of the reward and the constraint to complywith the reward must be given. The rewards may be considered in the form of cash money, grant for attending the conference or even a job contract. However, the reward proposal is at author's complete discretion.

Submitted tasks must be kept strictly confidential until the end of CATS 2014. After this time, authors are free to do whatever they wish with the tasks. A set of task proposals will be selected by the CATS Committee on the basis of their interest to the community, peculiarity and novelty.
The set of final selected tasks will be announced by December10, 2013.
All authors will be acknowledged at the close of CATS 2014.

SUBMISSION
Please submit proposals as soon as possible, preferably in a pdf file. Task materials must be placed together in a single file (use .zip or .tgz for multiple les) and submitted via email to the address: tasksubmission@cats-series.org.
Task proposals must be submitted by December 1, 2013

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
Receipt of submissions will be confirmed via email.The CATS Scientific Committee will carefully review allsubmissions and will select a list of tasks to be run at the CATS 2014 competition. The authors of the tasks selected for competition will be invited to attend the CATS 2014 as Invited Guests. Following the announcement of the selected tasks, the CATS Committee will publish corresponding Call for Participationto invite solutions for the selected tasks.The authors of the selected tasks will be asked to provide training data to competitors in order to test and evaluatetheir own solutions. Training data will be released tocompetitors by December 25 2013.At the end of the Call for Participation a set of evaluationdata will be provided to the CATS committee by the task authors. This data will be similar (but not equal) totraining data provided in the first phase of the process.Task authors could eventually ask to keep confidential theevaluation data and/or to participate duri!
ng the testingprocess of the submitted solutions. In this case authorsshould explicitly state their interest in keeping confidentialthe evaluation data. In any case training data mustbe released to the participants.Solutions will be checked first for correctness, and will beevaluated in terms of running times or in terms of someother measures of effectiveness. The authors of tasks included in the actual competitionwill also be recognized by listing their name, affiliationand country in the official CATS 2014 proceedings (unless they specifically decline this).

IMPORTANT DATES
1 December 2013 : Task submission deadline
1 January 2014 : Call for solutions
May 2014 : Registration deadline
June 2014 : Winners announcement
September 2014 : CATS Workshop

COMMITTEE
Simone Faro
Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, University of Catania, Italy
email: faro@dmi.unict.it

M. Oguzhan Kulekci
TUBITAK, National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology, Turkey
email: oguzhan.kulekci@tubitak.gov.tr


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