DCASE is a data challenge whose purpose is to produce new scientific knowledge about methods for detection and classification of sound scenes and events. It provides an open and reproducible evaluation platform, thus fostering collaborative research between participants. DCASE consists of independent tasks organized by teams who are, within the schedule defined by the DCASE Steering Group, responsible for producing the required data and instructions for participation, scoring the task submissions, providing a summary of the results and presenting the results at the DCASE Workshop.
The DCASE Steering Group invites proposals to organize tasks in the DCASE 2020 Challenge. The goal for DCASE 2020 Challenge is to foster gradual technology improvements through continuity of tasks, but also to bring novel research directions into the field, while keeping the number of tasks suitably low. In the interest of reducing the overlap and fragmentation of tasks, organizers may be requested to bring amendments to their task proposals before final acceptance. Collaborative tasks are strongly encouraged: task bidders from different labs but preparing tasks on similar topics are encouraged to team up before the deadline to prepare stronger collaborative proposals. For that purpose, the DCASE mailing list (dcase-discussions@googlegroups.com) can be used to express interest in teaming up with other task bidders, or an email can be sent to task coordinators (annamaria.mesaros@tuni.fi, romain.serizel@loria.fr) who will more privately share the contact information of other task bidders interested in teaming up.
Proposal
Task bidders should submit a task proposal for review by the Steering Committee. The proposal should be a maximum of two pages (pdf format preferred) including the following information:
- Task name
- Coordinators
- Keywords (e.g. tagging, classification, detection, timestamps, scenes, events, birds, etc)
- Definition (one sentence, e.g. classify a short test audio into one of 40 predefined classes)
- Short description (incl. research question the task is tackling, mention if it is a follow-up of previous years' task)
- Dataset description: development, evaluation (short description, how much data is already available and prepared, how long would it take to prepare the rest, mention if you allow external data/transfer learning or not)
- Evaluation method / metric 8 Baseline system (2 sentences, planned method if you do not have one from previous challenge)
- Contact person (for main communication, website)
Submission
The proposal should be sent to both DCASE Challenge coordinators annamaria.mesaros@tuni.fi and romain.serizel@loria.fr by 1st December 2019. The Steering Group will review the proposals and provide feedback by mid December. In case task amendments are requested, the task acceptance decision will be finalized by mid January 2020.
Important dates
tentative dates, may change
| 1 Dec 2019 | Submission of task proposals |
| 18 Dec 2019 | Feedback from Steering Group |
| 10 Jan 2020 | Resubmission of conditionally accepted proposals |
| 18 Jan 2020 | Notification of acceptance |
| 1 March 2020 | Challenge opening |
| 1 June 2020 | Evaluation set release |
| 15 June 2020 | Challenge submission deadline |
| 26-27 Oct 2020 | DCASE Workshop |