NeurIPS event, posters and proceedings

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Dear participants,

The NeurIPS event of the competition on December 9th is approaching fast ! Please find below some information and instructions about the event, the posters, and the final reports.

NeurIPS event

We have released the final program for our NeurIPS event, which is scheduled on December 9th. We are excited to have Kate Smith-Miles as a keynote speaker, who will share her view of the field and where it's headed, and also a panel discussion with several experts from the field, composed of Andrea Lodi, Timo Berthold, Frank Hutter, Vinod Nair, and Kevin Leyton-Brown. Of course, we'll also have a presentation from the winner of each of our three challenges (primal, dual, configuration) who will explain what they did to win the competition, and a poster session on Gathertown, open to all participants.

We would like to encourage you to attend the event if you can (from 18:45 GMT to 22:05 GMT), and also spread the word in your networks and communities. We count on you for the success of this event, which we hope will be a lively gathering of ML4CO enthusiasts and curious minds.

Note that a registration to the NeurIPS conference is required, however the cost of registration is not very high this year (100 USD regular, 25 USD for students).

Posters

We would also like to encourage all participants to come present a poster during the poster session, on December 9th 19:50-20:20 GMT. Presenting a poster is a unique opportunity to engage with the community, build your network, interact with the organizers and the other participants, and also share your experience of the ML4CO competition. At this date, only a few teams have confirmed that they will present a poster, and we have a capacity of 40 posters in the poster room, so please don't hesitate to come present a poster !

The deadline to send us your posters is November 30th 23:59 AoE, so that we can upload it to Gathertown in time for NeurIPS. The technical requirements for GatherTown are the following:
 - 2 files in PNG format, for the poster and for the poster's thumbnail
 - poster: must be no more than 5120 width x 2880 height and no more than 10 MB
 - thumbnail: must be 320 width x 256 height and no more than 5 MB

To send us your poster, just reply to this email, and indicate your team name, and the challenge(s) covered by the poster (primal, dual, config). The poster is merely a support to engage in discussions, and it can simply contain the name of your team, team members, and a brief description of your method (for example: which ML and/or OR tools you used, if you used a GPU, etc.). For the teams competing in different challenges, you can have a single poster summarizing all the challenges you participated in, or one poster per challenge if you wish.

Proceedings

We've created a new proceedings section on the competition's website, to officially acknowledge all teams and participants. We will use the information that you've provided when you registered for the competition, so please make sure that your team info is up to date, and includes the name and affiliation of all your team members. To check and update your team information you can use the link that you've received when you first registered for the competition, and you should be able to update the answers that were previously entered. If you don't find the email, you can also fill the form again, and we will use the latest info we receive for each team.

For the teams competing in different challenges, we allow you to provide a different team composition for each of the challenges. To do so, please provide one list of team members for each challenge in the field reserved for team members, as follows:

Primal task:
 - Bob X, Univ. Y
 - Alice Z, Univ. W
Dual task:
 - Bob X, Univ. Y
 - Charlie U, Company S
etc.

Final reports

Each team is also given the opportunity to write a short report describing their method (one report per challenge), which we will briefly review and include in the official proceedings of the competition, published on the competition's website.

The deadline to submit your reports is set to January 31st, but of course you can send them earlier. We ask you to follow the NeurIPS paper guidelines for writing your reports, with the modified style file neurips_ml4co_2021.sty that you will find attached to this email. Please send us a single PDF file per report, by replying to this email.

Test sets release

Lastly, since the competition is now over, we have released the complete test sets that were used for evaluation. You will find a link to the test sets, and the detailed results of each team here.

We thank you again for your interest in this competition, and we can't wait to meet you during our NeurIPS event !

Best,
The organizing team