Call for Competition Proposals

The International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2025 solicits proposals for competitions, within the technical scope of IJCNN 2025.

• Participation: Competition organizers should facilitate participation, communication, and impact. Competition organizers and/or their PhD students are not allowed to participate in the Competition they are organizing.
• Timeline: the Competition timeline is decided by the Competition organizers considering that the ultimate deadline for paper submissions is March 1, 2025.
• Funding: the Competition Organizers can support the prizes for winners by using external funding, coming from private/public entities or from the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, as described here.
• Webpage: the detailed description of the Competition, with all information regarding datasets, rules of participation, evaluation criteria and eventual prizes to winners, should be provided through a dedicated webpage, which must be accessible, at least, till the end of the IJCNN 2025 conference.
• Dataset: Organizers should make the competition datasets available to the participants. Organizers are encouraged to provide at least one training dataset with both input and ground truth and one test dataset without the ground truth—the latter to be used for final assessment. A secondary test set for evaluation, which is not available to participants, is also encouraged to highlight the generalizability of their approach. It is encouraged to also include a standard algorithm/model to serve as a baseline and for illustrative purposes.
• Evaluation: How the results are evaluated and ranked should be announced along with the Competition description. During the competition, the participants and organizers have to follow the Competition’s criteria carefully. The evaluation methods should be unbiased and transparent to all participants. The provision of baseline approaches and evaluation metrics is encouraged. Each Competition would have around 2 months to run the competition and rank/select winning teams.
• Competition Papers: the top teams (up to 3) for each Competition are allowed to be submitted a paper to be considered for publication in the IJCNN 2025 Proceedings on IEEE Xplore. The Competition Organizers are also allowed to submit a paper on the proposed Competition, including a careful description of the proposed dataset, challenge rules, baseline models, and achieved results. All these papers should have a 4-to-8 page length, according to the usual IEEE conference template used by the IJCNN 2025 conference. Other participants can also submit a 2-to-4 page paper to be considered as poster presentation at the conference but not to be included in the proceedings.
• Competition Special Session at IJCNN 2025: The Competition papers from top teams, if accepted for publication after the reviewing process, will be presented at IJCNN 2025 in a dedicated session. All these papers should be covered by an IJCNN 2025 registration and should be presented in person at the conference. The review process of the Competition papers will be coordinated by the IJCNN 2025 Competition Chairs with the support of the Competition organizers.

Prospective Competition organizers are expected to submit a proposal document (please limit it to 4 pages), including the following information:

• Title of the Competition
• A brief introduction to the Competition
• The expected impact and significance of the challenge in the research and/or industry community
• Details of the rules for participation
• Details of datasets that will be used for the Competition
• Criteria that will be used to evaluate the submitted solutions
• Details regarding the eventual funding of the Competition to support the prize for winners
• Details of the Competition organizers including names, affiliations and short bios
• The full challenge schedule including dates for data release, submission deadline and announcement of results
• List of potential reviewers for Competition papers (mandatory after acceptance of the proposal)

Competition proposals must be submitted as pdf files via the IJCNN 2025 CMT System.

• Competition Proposal Submission Deadline – November 15, 2024
• Competition Proposal Acceptance Notification – December 5, 2024
• Competition Papers Submission – March 1, 2025
• Competition Paper Acceptance Notification – April 1, 2025

• Yuki Mitsufuji – Sony AI, Japan
• Stefano Squartini – Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy
• Fabrizio Silvestri – Sapienza University of Rome, Italy