Subject: [iccrg] Aircraft Localization Competition 2019 - Call for Contesters

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2019 11:56:18 -0500

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Call for Contesters: Aircraft Localization Competition
2019

OVERVIEW

* Date: April 15, 2019
* Place: Montreal, Canada
* Registration Deadline:
February 15, 2019
* Co-located with ACM/IEEE IPSN and CPS-IoT
Week 2019
* Website: https://competition.opensky-network.org
* Student Travel Grants will be available soon
* Cash
Prizes up to 13.500,- EUR
* Partners/Sponsors: armasuisse,
OpenSky Network, SeRo Systems
*
Organisers/Committee:
- Matthias Schäfer (TU
Kaiserslautern/SeRo Systems GmbH, Germany)
- Martin
Strohmeier (University of Oxford, UK/armasuisse, Switzerland)
- Vincent Lenders (armasuisse, Switzerland)
- Mauro Leonardi (University of Rome Tor Vergata,
Italy)
- Fabio Ricciato (OpenSky Network,
Switzerland)

GOAL OF THE COMPETITION

This competition is about finding the best methods to localize
aircraft
based on crowdsourced air traffic control
communication data. The data
is collected by the OpenSky
Network, a large-scale sensor network which
continuously
collects air traffic control data from thousands of
aircraft
for research. The goal of the competition is to determine the
positions of all aircraft which do not have position reporting
capabilities or may report wrong locations. To do so, competitors
will
rely on time of arrival and signal strength measurements
reported by
many different sensors. Although methods like
multilateration are long
known, this data poses new challenges
because most of the low-cost
sensors are not time synchronised
or calibrated. Competitors will
therefore have to face
different kinds of noise, ranging from clock
drifts,
inaccurate sensor locations, or broken timestamps due to
software bugs.

ELIGIBILITY

We encourage both individuals and teams from academia and industry
to
register and participate. We strongly emphasize our
openness towards
novel approaches (such as machine learning)
but also allow competitors
to adapt their "traditional"
localization models to the peculiarities of
the crowdsourced
measurement data. The localization algorithms should be
able
to produce decent results from a fresh 1h data set (~1 GB CSV) in
under 3 hours.

CATEGORIES

Competitors can choose between four levels of increasing difficulty.
The
easiest category deals with data from GPS-synchronised
receivers only
and the competitors are provided with the
barometric altitude of the
aircraft. In this category,
competitors do not have to deal with clock
drifts and can
limit the effect of a bad vertical dilution of precision
by
additionally considering the barometric altitude of the target.
Category 2 competitors will also have GPS-synchronised data, however,
no
information about the target’s altitude will be
available. Category 3
and 4 competitors will face data from
both GPS-synchronised and
unsynchronised sensors. In addition,
category 3 data sets will include
the barometric
altitude.

COMPETITION EXECUTION

Competitors are provided with labelled training datasets which
include
all aircraft location. These labelled data sets can be
used by the
contesters to train their models. At the
competition day, each team has
to send at least 1 team member
to the conference where they will get
access to a non-labelled
evaluation data sets. The teams have then 9h to
find all
locations of aircraft that are missing location information in
the data sets. Every 3 hours, the teams have to submit their
intermediate results (as a CSV file) to the organizers. The
organizers
will then calculate an indicator of the accuracy of
their solution and
provide an intermediate ranking. After 9
hours, the teams submit their
final results and the final
ranking is determined.

EVALUATION AND PRIZE

On the competition day (April 15), all teams have to submit
their
intermediate results to the organizers every three
hours. These
intermediate results will then be rated using an
objective error metric
and the scores will be published. The
teams can then continue to improve
their results, e.g., by
further pre-filtering the data or improving
their models ad
hoc. The leading teams of each intermediate evaluation
(i.e.
after 3h and 6h) will receive increasing cash awards. The awards
will reach their maximum at the 9h deadline, when all teams have
to
submit their final results. The best 3 teams of each
category will also
receive cash prizes for their final
results. The cash prizes are scaled
with the level of
competition and the difficulty of the category. This
means
that the more competitors and the higher the difficulty in a
category, the higher the prizes. The exact pricing can be found on
our
website: https://competition.opensky-network.org/competition.html#awards

The teams with the best final results (after 9h) of each category
will
have to present their solutions in a short presentation
at the
conference. In addition, all teams who won cash awards
(intermediate or
final prizes) will have to publish their code
under the GNU GPLv3 on the
OpenSky Network's github account.
Teams that do not want to publish
their code are not eligible
for awards. This means that closed-source
solution can also
compete but they will not be eligible for cash prizes.