April 21, 2022 — The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is now seeking researchers of all career stages to register by June 23 for its annual Data Challenge, part of the Smoky Mountains Computational Sciences and Engineering Conference, or SMC2022.
Each entrant will have access to real scientific datasets contributed by ORNL, industry, and academia. The provenance of these datasets comes from scientific simulation and instruments in the areas of electron microscopy, bioinformatics, spallation neutron sources, urban development, and other scientific domains. Teams of up to six participants can choose to tackle one or more of the event’s eight different research challenges and will be divided into multiple categories to compete against others with a similar level of expertise.
For each challenge, a team of data sponsors and liaisons will provide a downloadable dataset along with increasingly difficult tasks and questions that range from simple brainteasers to open-ended issues under discussion in the broader research community.
To kick off the competition, the organizing committee will host a webinar the second week of May, during which representatives from each challenge will describe their expectations and answer questions from participants. The webinar will be recorded and posted on the Data Challenge website, which will also provide other relevant updates in the coming months.
Teams can submit full or partial solutions to these research problems if team members demonstrate their progress and prove that they have gained a better understanding of the tasks and topic at hand. This year’s challenges and associated datasets are brand new.
Data sponsors will judge the real-world viability of the proposed solutions and name three to four finalists for each challenge. Selected teams will have the opportunity to write and submit a research paper detailing the methods and resources used to reach high-quality results. After going through the peer review process with the SMC2022 program committee, accepted papers will be published in the Springer conference proceedings.
Additionally, the winners will be invited to attend and present a poster at SMC2022, which will take place from August 24 to 25 at the MeadowView Conference Resort and Convention Center in Kingsport, Tennessee. These presentations will consist of three-minute lightning talks with two minutes for questions from data sponsors and other attendees. If the team representative cannot attend, ORNL will provide a mentor to present the poster on their behalf.
This year’s challenge options are as follows:
- Challenge 1: Machine Learning approaches to High Throughput Phenotyping
- Challenge 2: Analysis of the Summit Login Nodes Usage Data
- Challenge 3: Finding Hidden Patterns in High Resolution Wind Flow Model Simulations
- Challenge 4: Sustainable Cities: Socioeconomics, Building Types, and Urban Morphology
- Challenge 5: Proteome-scale Structure Prediction Data Analysis
- Challenge 6: Sentinel-3 Satellite Datasets: OLCI & SLSTR
- Challenge 7: HPC Power and Thermal Characteristics in the Wild
- Challenge 8: Automating Signal Extraction – Scientist vs Computer
Visit the website for paper submission details and other important deadlines.
UT-Battelle manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.
Source: ORNL