The ICML 2013 Workshop on Challenges in Representation Learning focused on three challenges: the black box learning challenge, the facial expression recognition challenge, and the multimodal learning challenge. We describe the datasets created for these challenges and summarize the results of the competitions. We provide suggestions for organizers of future challenges and some comments on what kind of knowledge can be gained from machine learning competitions.

Microsoft Academic Search is a free search engine specific to scholarly material. It currently covers more than 50 million publications and over 19 million authors across a variety of domains. One of the main challenges in correctly indexing this material is author name ambiguity and the resulting noise in author profiles. KDD Cup 2013 invited participants to tackle this problem in 2 ways: (1) by automatically determining which papers in an author profile are truly written by a given author, and (2) by identifying which author profiles need to be merged because they belong to the same author. This paper presents a brief account of the contest and the lessons learned.

KDD Cup 2013 challenged participants to tackle the problem of author name ambiguity in a digital library of scientific publications. The competition consisted of two tracks, which were based on large-scale datasets from a snapshot of Microsoft Academic Search, taken in January 2013 and including 250K authors and 2.5M papers. Participants were asked to determine which papers in an author profile are truly written by a given author (track 1), as well as to identify duplicate author profiles (track 2). Track 1 and track 2 were launched respectively on April 18 and April 20, 2013, with a common final submission deadline on June 12, 2013. For track 1 a training dataset with correct labels was diclosed at the start of the competition. This track was the most popular one, attracting submissions of 561 different teams. Track 2, which was formulated as an unsupervised learning task, received submissions from 241 participants. This paper presents details about the problem definitions, the datasets, the evaluation metrics and the results.

Predicting future traffic congestion has the potential to decrease travel times by improving GPS navigation and enhancing traffic flows. This paper describes a methodology developed to predict future automated traffic recorder (ATR) readings with current and recent ones from local ATRs. Data was preprocessed by down sampling the simulated ATR signals. Additional training sets were created by resampling the ATR signals at incremental offsets. Regression Random Forests were trained to predict future ATR recordings, and an ensemble of Random Forests created with different preprocessing techniques was formed. This ensemble performed within the top 1% in one track of the 2010 IEEE ICDM Contest: Tom Tom Traffic Prediction for Intelligent GPS Navigation, improving 43.4% on the baseline algorithm.