Competition Participation Rules for "IEEE BigData 2023 Cup: Object Recognition with Muon Tomography using Cosmic Rays”

By entering this Competition you accept these official Competition rules.

1. Organizer

1. The Competition is organized by QED Software (https://qed.pl/), in association with the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2023, https://bigdataieee.org/BigData2023/index.html). The Organizer in the meaning of art. 919 and art. 921 of the Polish Civil Code is QED Software (the Organiser), registered at Ul. Mazowiecka 11/49 00-052 Warszawa.
2. The Competition is sponsored by QED Software (the Sponsor)
3. The Competition is organized via the KnowledgePit platform (available at knowledgepit.ai or knowledgepit.ml) and any submissions made outside of the platform will not be admissible.

2. Entry

1. The Competition is open to all interested researchers, specialists, and students.
2. Members of the Contest Organizing Committee (see the dedicated section on the Competition page) and employees of the Organizer, the Sponsor, and their affiliated entities are not allowed to participate.
3. Persons who are residents of, or are affiliated with or employed by or otherwise contractually or legally tied to an organization, educational institution, company, or other entity of the Russian Federation or another state or territory that falls under the scope of international sanctions or controls for reasons of war, terrorism or otherwise, are not allowed to participate. The current list of such legal restrictions in force in the European Union is available at https://sanctionsmap.eu/#/main. If you have any doubt about whether such restriction may apply to you, the Organiser reserves the right to verify eligibility and to adjudicate your eligibility at any time.
4. Participants must be of legal age of majority (Check your country’s law, in Poland and in most countries it is 18 years of age).
5. Registration for the Competition is done via the KnowledgePit platform (knowledgepit.ai or knowledgepit.ml).

3. Timeline

• A detailed Competition time schedule is available in the Schedule section (below) of the Competition page.

4. Participants and Teams

1. A person may enroll in the Competition with only one KnowledgePit user account. Using multiple accounts constitutes grounds for exclusion from the Competition.
2. Participants submit their solutions as members of teams made up of one or more persons.
3. Each participant may be a member of only one Team enrolled in the challenge.
4. Each Team must designate one of the Team Members as the Team Leader responsible for communication with the Organizer.
5. A single KnowledgePit account can only be associated with one Team in a given competition. It is not possible to withdraw from a Team, but Teams can be merged.
6. Merging is done between Teams by their respective Team Leaders through the KnowledgePit platform and requires the consent of both Teams.
7. Participation in the Competition is free and voluntary.
8. Privately sharing elements of the solution such as code or data outside of Teams is not permitted and may result in disqualification of the persons or Teams involved, however, it is permitted to share remarks and ideas with all participants on the Knowledge Pit Competition Forums.
9. Participants must use their own resources, particularly software and other necessary tools and equipment needed to prepare a solution to be submitted.

5. Solutions

1. Participants submit their solutions through the Knowledge Pit platform.
2. The submitted solution is checked for errors, and if none is found, the solution is immediately included on the public Leaderboard.
3. There is a strict limit on the total number of solutions that can be submitted by a Team during the Competition and also, on the number of solutions that can be submitted daily.
4. For this Competition, those limits are set to 400 and 10, respectively.
5. The daily submission limit resets at 11:59 PM GMT.
6. When two Teams merge, their solutions accumulate, but the limits for the resulting Team remain unchanged.
7. If a Team exceeds the limit for the total number of submissions, the Team will be unable to submit new solutions until the Competition ends.
8. Team can select up to three solutions for the final evaluation, and the best of them will constitute the Team’s final score (Final Solution).
9. If a Team fails to select their 3 solutions for final evaluation, then this team’s solution with the highest score on the public Leaderboard is automatically selected as the Team’s Final Solution.

6. Evaluation

1. Each Team is obliged to provide a short Report describing their Final Solution. The Report must contain information such as the name of the Team, the names of all Team Members, and a brief overview of the approach used in the solution. The description should explain all data pre-processing steps and model construction steps. It should be submitted in the KnowledgePit platform submission system by the Report Submission Date specified in the Schedule section of the Competition page (below).
2. The final evaluation takes place after the expiry of the Report Submission Date.
3. After the Final Evaluation, three top-ranked Teams will be asked to provide the source codes that can be used to reproduce their Final Solutions and Documentation that would allow running the code. If the code requires to be run within a complex environment (e.g. distributed Hadoop cluster), a detailed setup explanation should be provided as well. The source codes will be used to verify the legitimacy of the solutions and will be shared with the Competition Sponsor in accordance with the provisions of Section 9 below. 
4. For a Team to be eligible for an Award in this Competition, a Team must be one of the three top-ranked teams. Moreover, a Team must provide the report and source codes upon request for the verification of their legitimacy. 
5. In this Competition, the teams are eligible for monetary prizes only if their final solution improves the baseline.
6.  If the Contest Organising Committee refrains from indicating such a solution in its announcement of winners, the additional prize will not be awarded. This additional prize may be awarded to any team, including one of the winners of the main prizes. 
7. The Organizer holds the right to extend the deadlines for submitting solutions and/or reports. In such a case, participants will be informed about such an extension through the KnowledgePit platform Competition Forum.
8. The Organizer is not responsible for any consequences of technical issues related to the participant’s ability to access or submit to the KnowledgePit platform, especially for issues relating to Internet connectivity. If due to technical problems within the Organizer’s control, the resulting delays or temporary unavailability of the platform or its components are likely to impact the participant’s ability to timely submit the Team’s solution, the challenge deadline will be extended by the Organizer by the time of such unavailability, and participants will be informed of such extension by email.
9. The final ranking of the competing Teams will be published based on the final evaluation results.
10. In the case of draws in the evaluation scores, the time of the submission will be taken into account.

7. Prizes

1. The Prizes are listed in the dedicated section of the Competition page.
2. Each prize comprises two components: a monetary amount and the ability for a selected Team Member to participate in the IEEE BigData 2023 conference. The Organiser shall cover a maximum of one registration fee per winning team. The registration fee is a prize component that is non-monetary, and cannot be converted into a monetary value.
3. Each winning Team must select their representative Team Member to participate in the 2023 IEEEE International Conference on Big Data and notify their selection to the Organizer. If no Team Member is selected by his or her Team to participate in the conference, the registration fee shall be deemed forfeited and not constitute part of the prize. 
4. Following the announcement of the winners, The Organiser shall pay the monetary prizes to the winning teams. Each winning team shall notify the Organizer within 21 days following the announcement of how the Team wishes the monetary prize to be paid out (single payment, split payments, etc.).
5. In order to receive the Prize, each prize recipient is required to submit to the Organizer all documents necessary for the remittance of such prizes, such as their personal detail, including bank account number, their certificate of tax residency issued by the tax authority of their place of residence or other documents required by law. If such necessary documents are not submitted within the time limit indicated in the notification of the award, the monetary prize cannot be paid out and is deemed to have been forfeited by the winner.
6. The winning participant who fails or refuses to provide the necessary legal documentation such as defined above will be deemed to have forfeited the monetary prize, and such prize will not be paid out. In such a case, the winning Team may select another of its members as the recipient of such a prize.
7. In accordance with the law, the Organizer shall cover the tax payments required on the awarded prizes at the rates and on terms prescribed by law in the country of the Organizer (Poland).
8. The Organizer is not responsible in any way for any duties, levies, fees, or taxes that the winning participant may be subject to in his or her country of residence. It is the sole responsibility of the winning participant to inquire at the appropriate authorities about applicable documentation and/or tax payments that she or he may be required to submit.

8. Claims

1. Submissions are not admissible if they are in whole or part illegible, incomplete, damaged, altered, counterfeit, obtained through fraud, or late, or made or submitted in breach of these Rules.
2. Participant may be disqualified if the Organizer reasonably believes that the participant has attempted to undermine the legitimate operation of the Competition by using multiple accounts, cheating, deception, or other unfair playing practices or abuses, threats, or harassment towards other participants or the Organizer.
3. Organizer may at its discretion reject any submission or disqualify any participant if the Organizer reasonably believes that it was – respectively - produced in an unfair or illegitimate way or submitted by a person who has broken the challenge rules without providing any additional explanation.
4. If you think you were excluded without reason, or have any questions, please contact the Organizer at contact@knowledgepit.ai.

9. Data security, Privacy and Copyright

1. Each participant agrees to use reasonable and suitable measures to prevent persons who have not formally agreed to these Rules from gaining access to the Competition data. 
2. You agree not to transmit, duplicate, publish, redistribute or otherwise provide or make available the Competition data to any party not participating in the Competition. You agree to notify the Organizer immediately upon learning of any possible unauthorized transmission of or unauthorized access to the Competition data and agree to work with the Organizer to rectify any unauthorized transmission or access.
3. Each report, paper, and any other type of publication based on the team’s or participant’s research where data from this Competition is used should accredit KnowledgePit, Organiser and Sponsors as the institutions that provided data for the study.
4. The fact of accepting the award is equivalent to granting to the Organizers and Sponsors a worldwide, non-exclusive, sub-licensable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable right to use, reproduce, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform, publicly display, digitally perform, make, have made, sell, offer for sale and/or import, the winning solution submitted and the source code used to generate it, in any media now known or hereafter developed, for any purpose whatsoever, commercial or otherwise, without further approval, and without any payment to the participant or participants who authored or co-authored it. By accepting the award the participants also acknowledge that they have full and unrestricted rights to grant the aforementioned rights.
5. By enrolling in this Competition, the participant grants his/her consent for the processing of her/his registration data and the submissions and reports, and grants the Organizer the rights to use such data and submissions for the purpose of evaluation of solutions, competition administrative purposes and in post-competition research.
6. By accepting the award the winning participant grants the Organiser the right to process his or her personal data such as name, address, personal identification or security number, bank account or credit card number, and other necessary details provided for the purposes of prize processing and payment, including the payment of applicable taxes.
7. By accepting the award the participant grants the Organizer the right to use the participant's name, affiliation, and/or prize information for the purpose of informational and promotional purposes of the Competition and the KnowledgePit platform in any medium without additional compensation.
8. Participant’s data is administered by the Organiser and shall be processed in accordance with the European data protection and privacy rules (The General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679). For more information check Organizer’s Privacy Policy.

 10. Final arrangements

1. The Organizer reserves the right to modify the Rules of this Competition, including without limitation for the purpose of clarification, correcting obvious editing mistakes, extending the deadlines for the benefit of participants, or other minor amendments. In the event of any change to the Rules, participants will be informed of them via the Competition forum.
2. Unless otherwise provided in the Competition Rules above, all claims arising out of or relating to these Rules will be governed by Polish law and will be litigated in Poland. Participant consent to personal jurisdiction in those courts.
3. If any provision of these Rules is held to be invalid or unenforceable, all remaining provisions of the Rules will remain in full force and effect.