Timing and duration

The AI4EO challenge will take place online from from 1 February, 2021 to 25 May, 2021.

Participants

Participants can join from all over the world. You must be over 18, or of legal age in your jurisdiction, in order to participate.

Teams

Each team has to appoint a team leader. This team leader will be the main contact point between the organisers and the team, and will also be responsible to ensure a smooth team cooperation, and, if your team wins, to make a proposal on the spending of your team’s points after discussion with the team members.

Challenge solution

For the challenge, you will have access to the training datasets and a range of tools in the form of a Jupyter notebook. The teams must propose a solution for our AI4EO challenge, using an AI algorithm. No other datasets can be used for the development of your solution.

As you will see in the training dataset, data for several Areas of Interest are provided, as we would like you to develop a solution that works in different locations. For the output, each team must produce results for each AoI, as all of them will be considered in the final evaluation.

Each participant will be allowed to upload a maximum of one result per hour, for each AoI and for each pollutant (to avoid overload and unfair behaviours). The final submission of your solution must be made by 25 May 2021, at 23:59 CET, and each final entry must consist of:

(a) the output datasets

• Covering all three Areas of Interest (500x500 km2 each): North Italy, California and South Africa.
• Consisting of downscaled CAMS PM2.5 products, from their original spatial resolution of 10x10 km2 to 1x1 km2 over Europe (from 40x40 km2 to 10x10 km2 outside Europe); and Sentinel-5P Level-2 NO2 products, from their original spatial resolution of 7x3.5 km2 to 1x1 km2.
• All output datasets must cover a period of one season in 2019:
• November, December 2018 and January 2019 for Italy and California
• June, July and August 2019 for South Africa.

(b) The algorithm, as a Jupyter notebook

Challenge evaluation

The evaluation of the solutions submitted will be performed in two stages: live scoring of the accuracy of your solution throughout the challenge, which will be visible on the leaderboard on this platform; and an evaluation by a jury consisting of experts after the final submission of your code.

The total score of a participant will be calculate as follows:

• 75/100 will be based on an automatic calculation of the accuracy of your output datasets, using objective metrics (more information here)
• 25/100 will be based on an evaluation by a jury, who will consider the extent to which you effectively used or incorporated the datasets provided and the methodologies you applied, in addition to uniqueness, quality, reproducibility and contribution to open science of your solution.

The objective evaluation will produce a total score that will be calculated by a weighted combination of the score for each pollutant, as follows:

• 37.5/75 for PM2.5
• 37.5/75 for NO2

The solution submitted by the participants have to be reproducible by the challenge organisers, starting only from the test data set.

The qualitative jury evaluation will produce a qualitative jury score what will be based on the following parameters:

• How well code is documented
• Level of creativity and originality
• Contribution to Open Science
• Completeness and scalability of the released code.

Prizes

Four winning teams (one prize being reserved to students) will have the chance to win a pot of award points, which can be spent on the prizes listed in the challenge-specific catalogue after a request has been made by the team leader for the distribution of the selected prizes to the Organisers.

Use of commercial data in this challenge

By registering for, or submitting materials to this challenge, you are accepting the licensing terms and conditions on the use of commercial VHR imagery, as stated in the Terms and Conditions of AI4EO.

Announcements of the winners

The winning projects will be disclosed at the end of May 2021.

Ownership of your solution

Any of your IPR contained in the solution you will develop for this challenge will remain yours. While we ask to submit your code at the end of this challenge to be eligible for the prizes, we will only use this to validate that you have used Artificial Intelligence, and to evaluate the quality of your code. Any jury member, organiser, or other stakeholder who will view your code will sign an NDA.

Full Terms and Conditions

By participating in this challenge, each team member agrees to the Terms and Conditions provided under this link.