1st International Competition on Plagiarism Detection
webis.de
webis.de
Plagiarism is a problem for copyright holders since they want to ensure that they don't get plagiarized. HOWEVER it is a very expensive task and does not bear as much fruit as it might.
Automation of this will bring many many financial benefits to the copyright holders by reducing costs and increasing detection rates.
And all this work is to be done for a measly 500 euro??? I remember reading a job posting of a guy wanting someone to write a windows-like OS for $500, which is compatible with all windows apps but is more stable/secure/bug free.
Good luck getting competitors!
Admittedly, the prize is more then an order of magnitude higher, (and just requires software), so there might be more takers.
Skimming the page, they've assumed their audience already knows what they mean. I know of a couple of academics interested in this work; and I believe there's quite a large audience. You can imagine that teachers and lectures would like to be able to automatically check for plagiarism (esp hard with the internet when it could be copied from anyone in the world, not just in the one classroom)