Timing and duration

The AI4EO challenge will take place online from from 14 June, 2021 to 30 September, 2021.

Participants

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

Teams

Each team is required 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 request on the spending of your team’s award 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. Pre-trained models of any kind are NOT allowed.

Each participant will be allowed to upload a maximum of one result per hour (to avoid overload and unfair behaviors). The final submission of your solution must be made by 30 September 2021, at 16:59 CET, and each final entry must consist of:

• The output dataset
  • Cultivated land binary mask at 2.5m resolution.
• The algorithm, as a Jupyter notebook

Challenge evaluation

The evaluation of the solutions submitted will be performed in two stages:

Quantitative: live scoring of the accuracy of your solution throughout the challenge, which will be visible on the leaderboard on this platform; and

Quality: by a jury consisting of experts after the final submission of your code.

Your final score will be calculated by combining the rankings of the quantitative results of your submissions (75% of the total score) with the rankings of the scores from the judges on a set of criteria: quality of the documentation, creativity and originality, contribution to open science, scalability and reproducibility (25% of the total score).

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

• 75/100 will be based on an automatic calculation of the accuracy of your output datasets, using the weighted Matthews Correlation Coefficient between the reference map and your models' estimates as follows:

where TP, TN, FP and FN respectively denote true positives, true negatives, false positives and false negatives. 25/100 will be based on an evaluation by a jury, which 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.

• 25/100 will be based on an evaluation by a jury, which 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 results presented will have to be reproducible by the challenge organisers, starting only from the analysis data set.

Prizes

Four winning teams (one prize being reserved to students, individuals holding a student card and not having yet graduated at Master level) 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.

Announcements of the winners

The winning projects will be disclosed at the $\Phi$-Week in October 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.

Force Majeure

In case of force majeure, for example network connection issues to the server computing the metrics, data download issues, issues with the cloud computing resources, or other incidents not controlled by the organising team, the organisers will determine, based on the severity and duration of the incident, if and for how long the challenge should be extended. Such information will be communicated to the participating teams as soon as possible within European working hours.

Full Terms and Conditions

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