IEEE International Workshop on
Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) 2025
August 31-September 3, Istanbul/Turkey
Signal Processing in the age of
Large Language Models
IEEE

CALL FOR DATA COMPETITIONS

The 35th MLSP Workshop is looking for Data Competitions (DC) organizers. Data competitions should encompass challenging applied machine learning problems. The prospective organizers should aim to engage machine learning and signal processing research communities, researchers from the industry, and practitioners.

Data Competition proposals have to contain the following information:

  • Names, affiliations, and contact information of the session organizers
  • Brief biographies of the session organizer
  • Description of the data competition
  • Description of the dataset provided for training and evaluation criteria and methodology, guidelines for proponents, challenge timeline (make sure that you respect the timelines proposed below)
  • One-page example call for participation
  • List of potential participants (It's better if you communicate with potential participants and get their confirmation)
Participation

Data Competition organizers should facilitate participation, communication, and impact. Data Competition organizers are not allowed to participate in their competition.

Dataset

If applicable to the challenge, organizers are encouraged to provide at least one training dataset with both input and ground truth and one test dataset without the ground truth 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.

Evaluation

How the results are evaluated and ranked should be announced along with the challenge description. The evaluation methods should be unbiased and transparent to all participants. Provision of baseline approaches and evaluation metrics is encouraged.

Papers

Each challenge would have around 2 months to run the competition and rank/select winning teams. Each challenge can have up to 5 papers from the top-ranked teams. The format should be consistent with MLSP regular paper. The DC organizers have to send the paper acceptance notification within the timelines indicated below. All the accepted and presented papers under the data competitions track will be published in and indexed by IEEE Xplore.

The submissions to the data competitions track can benefit from the pool of reviewer pool of MLSP 2025. In addition, the organizers are welcome to use their own reviewer pool also.

Sessions

DC sessions will be organized in the MLSP 2025 program. This session will include DC paper presentations (oral or poster) and a panel or open discussion. The organizers should propose a tentative timeline program in their proposal. Here are some examples below. (You do not have to follow these examples exactly, feel free to come up with your own session structure). Overall you need to conclude within 2-3 hours.

  • Example 1: Series of oral presentations followed by an open discussion involving all participants
  • Example 2: Series of oral presentations followed by a poster session and an open discussion with all participants

The proposals should be sent to datacompetitions@mlsp2025.org before the indicated deadline.

Important Dates

March 1, 2025:
Deadline for data competition proposal submissions
March 10, 2025:
Notification of accepted data competitions
May 20, 2025:
Deadline for data competition paper submissions
June 24, 2025:
Notification of paper acceptance
July 15, 2025:
Camera-ready upload
All deadlines are in AoE time, 23.59.