ECML/PKDD 2011 Recommender System Challenge. Prize fund is EUR 5,500

Discovery challenge affiliated with ECML/PKDD 2011 Conference started on April 18th. It is organized and sponsored by EU project e-LICO and launched via the TunedIT platform. The challenge is related to recommendation of lectures recorded at VideoLectures.Net site and is based on lecture viewing sequences and contents from the site. Best solutions will be awarded with prizes worth 5,000 EUR. Competition web page: http://tunedit.org/challenge/VLNetChallenge VideoLectures.net is a free and open access multimedia repository of video lectures, mainly of research and educational character. The lectures are given by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science. The portal is aimed at promoting science, exchanging ideas and fostering knowledge sharing by providing high quality didactic contents not only to the scientific community but also to the general public. All lectures, accompanying documents, information and links are systematically selected and classified through the editorial process taking into account also users' comments. The challenge is organized in order to improve the website’s recommender system. The challenge consists of two main tasks and a “side-by” contest. Due to the nature of the problem, each of the tasks has its own merit: the first task simulates new-user and new-item recommendation (cold-start mode) situation; the second task simulates (normal mode) clickstream based recommendation. A side-by contest is organized for the best computational workflow, to be chosen by an expert panel. The competition will last till 8th July 2011. e-LICO is a virtual laboratory for interdisciplinary collaborative research in data mining and data-intensive sciences, built through an EU FP 7. e-LICO lab consists of three layers: the e-science layer, data mining layer and application domains, one of which is related to the domain of multimedia repositories and problem of recommendation. ECML/PKDD - The European Conference on "Machine Learning" and "Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases" provides an international forum for the discussion of the latest high quality research results in all areas related to machine learning, knowledge discovery in databases, data mining and new innovative application domains. ECML/PKDD 2011 is held in Athens, Greece on September 5-9. TunedIT is a web platform for data mining researchers and practitioners. It delivers a set of tools that facilitate experimental investigation and scientific collaboration in the field of data mining and machine learning.