Yahoo! ML events

Yahoo! is sponsoring two machine learning events that might interest people.

1. The Key Scientific Challenges program (due March 5) for Machine Learning and Statistics offers $5K (plus bonuses) for graduate students working on a core problem of interest to Y! If you are already working on one of these problems, there is no reason not to submit, and if you aren’t you might want to think about it for next year, as I am confident they all press the boundary of the possible in Machine Learning. There are 7 days left.
2. The Learning to Rank challenge (due May 31) offers an $8K first prize for the best ranking algorithm on a real (and really used) dataset for search ranking, with presentations at an ICML workshop. Unlike the Netflix competition, there are prizes for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place, perhaps avoiding the heartbreak the ensemble encountered. If you think you know how to rank, you should give it a try, and we might all learn something. There are 3 months left.