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THE SPOCK CHALLENGE

50 000 dollars à gagner

At Spock, we love finding and meeting new people. It’s our business.

What is Spock?
Spock, an industry leading people search application, helps users find and discover people on the web. With over one hundred million individuals indexed and millions added every day, Spock is the largest and most comprehensive people specific search application.

Our Technology
At the core, we organize relevant information around people and have developed unique technologies to do so. Not only is this a very fun product for us and our users, we are also fortunate enough to be working on some of the most interesting problems in computer science!

The Challenge
To improve our technology and to create a better user experience, we decided to share the fun! We have selected one of our most interesting problems, namely Entity Resolution, to share with the community, allowing other leading computer scientists and engineers to compete in an open contest. The winners of this global competition will reap a handsome reward, and perhaps even employment at Spock.

You can work individually and in teams. The competition will last 4 months and the winning team will win a Grand Prize of $50,000! Most importantly you’ll be working on a very important and widely applicable problem. We will also be issuing prizes for 2nd and 3rd place.

Click here to learn more about the Entity Resolution and Extraction Problem 

The SPOCK Entity Resolution Problem:

A common problem that we face is that there are many people with the same name. Given that, how do we distinguish a document about Michael Jackson the singer from Michael Jackson the football player?

With billions of documents and people on the web, we need to identify and cluster web documents accurately to the people they are related to. Mapping these named entities from documents to the correct person is the essence of the Spock Challenge.

The complete data-set is divided into training and test sets containing roughly 25,000 and 75,000 documents, respectively. Along with a set of documents we've included a set of target names. You can assume that each document contains only one of the target names (even though most documents contain many names). The challenge is to partition all the documents relevant to a target name by their referent. Consider the following two documents with the target name "Michael Jackson":
  Michael Jackson - The King of Pop or Wacko Jacko?
  Michael Jackson statistics - pro-football-reference.com
The referents of these articles are the pop star and football player, respectively. We've included the ground truth for the training set so you have something to compare against.

Once you're done training, you can run your algorithm on the test set and submit your results on this site. We will provide instant feedback in the form of a percentage rank score (using the F-measure, described below). This way you can see how you stack up against the other teams. What good is a problem without a little competition?

The Process

• Register for the contest
• Download the dataset
• Submit your proposal
• Get qualified to enter contest (based upon your proposal)
• Develop your algorithm and software and submit/resubmit results to be scored
• Check leaderboard
• Spock selects finalists
• Prepare your software and data for the final round of testing.
• Defense and award at Spock HQ
  

The key judges for this contest are:

• 
  
• Professor Chris Manning, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Lingustics at Stanford University
• Professor Hector Garcia Molina, Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University
• Professor Serge Plotkin, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University
• Hongche Liu, PhD, Chief Information Architect, Spock Networks
• Jeff Winner, Serial Entrepreneur and VP Engineering, Spock Networks
• David Stern, Venture Capitalist, Clearstone Venture Partners

Cash and glamor aside, you will have the unique opportunity to meet leading Industry Professionals, Academics, and Venture Capitalists, who are at the forefront of leading edge technologies and companies. The SPOCK Challenge is an opportunity which can distinguish you instantly amongst Academics & industry professionals, and jump start your career in the Silicon Valley.

There is no cost to enter, no purchase of anything is required, and you need not be a registered SPOCK user (although we would love for you to register). So if you know (or want to learn) something about entity extraction, give it a shot. We’ll make it worth your while.