Intelligent Systems Challenge Targets Illegal Operations at Sea

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

First annual Joint Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association and Precarn Contest asks Students to solve real world problem

Windsor, Ontario - May 28, 2008 - The Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association / Association pour l'intelligence artificielle au Canada (CAIAC) and Precarn Incorporated are proud to announce the Intelligent Systems Challenge (ISC) competition for Canadian university, college and high school students. Teams are invited each year to invent the best intelligent system solution to a challenge faced by Canadian companies, organizations and society as a whole.

Each year CAIAC and Precarn solicits proposals for challenge problems from Canadian technology leaders. The chosen ISC problem will be of importance to Canada, and its solution will require the development of advanced software programs using methods and technologies from the areas of artificial intelligence and intelligent systems.

The main objectives of the competitions are:

to promote innovation in Canada;
to promote contacts between academia and industry in Canada;
to increase the awareness of and interest in technologies and methods from the areas of artificial intelligence and intelligent systems for addressing the challenges faced by Canadian industry, organizations and society as a whole; and
to contribute to the development of students’ aptitude and ability through solving challenging real world problems.

Cash prizes will be awarded in three categories:

best team of Canadian university graduate students;
best team of Canadian university undergraduate and college students;
best team of Canadian high school students.

There will also be a grand cash prize to the team that produces the overall best solution to the challenge problem.

This year's challenge: Protecting Canada's Coastal Border

Various Canadian government agencies are responsible for protecting Canada, asserting sovereignty, and enforcing the law in the maritime approaches to Canada. They thus continually watch for ships that are behaving strangely, based on data from surveillance flights, for example, voluntary reports from the ships, and (in the near future) satellite data from Radarsat 2. They know, however, that surveillance data is typically infrequent, irregular, and imprecise and might even have been faked by the perpetrators.

This year's challenge problem focuses on one example problem: can we detect a cargo ship rendezvousing with another vessel at sea? Such rendezvous are seldom necessary to meet legitimate commercial objectives.

The core problem is that the actual rendezvous will seldom be observed directly - it must be inferred or ruled out based on the tracks of the ships before and after they intersect. This is a problem of model reconstruction from sparse data in one time and two space dimensions. Winning solutions must have a low false alarm rate, while still detecting the briefest of encounters.

Initially, students will be given a large set of synthetic tracking datasets, each one tagged with "what really happened". As the contest deadline approaches, a "test dataset" will be published, but with no information about what really happened. Students will run their software on all the datasets, and send in their descriptions of what they think probably happened. The group that predicts best wins.

The challenge will be announced Wednesday May 28 at 9:15 in the plenary opening session of the Intelligent Systems Collaborative Conference in Windsor, Ontario and through the CAIAC Precarn Intelligent Systems Challenge website, http://www.intelligent-systems-challenge.ca.

The challenge was proposed by Vancouver-based MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA), the company that developed Canadarm, Radarsat-2, and the satellite image processing systems used for Google Earth.

Student teams being working on the challenge in July 2008 and submit their final solutions in early spring 2009. The winners will be announced at the 2009 Intelligent Systems Collaborative Conference in Kelowna, BC.

About CAIAC

CAIAC - The Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association / Association pour l'intelligence artificielle au Canada - fosters excellence and leadership in research, development and education in Canada's artificial intelligence community by facilitating the exchange of knowledge through various media and venues.

For contact information and further details, see: www.caiac.ca

About Precarn
Precarn Incorporated is an independent not-for-profit company that supports the pre-commercial development of leading edge technologies. Precarn works with Canadian companies who are seeking to commercialize their new ideas to get an edge in the global market. Unlike other research funding programs, Precarn uses a collaborative model that includes a developer, a customer and an academic research partner in every project. This collaboration accelerates development, reduces risk and shares the cost of innovation. Precarn provides access to an extensive national network of world-class researchers, innovative companies and sources of funding.

About MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd.
Started in 1969 in Vancouver by Dr. John MacDonald and Werner Dettwiler, MDA now employs over 3,000 people through offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. It provides advanced information solutions that capture and process vast amounts of data, produce essential information, and improve the decision making and operational performance of business and government organizations worldwide.

About our sponsors
Intelligent Systems Challenge relies on sponsorship from industry to cover the cash prizes to the students. Through their support of the 2009 Intelligent Systems Challenge, sponsors help us showcase how Canadian students can apply their knowledge and energy to solve a real-world problem that is relevant to Canadian industry and society, and strengthen links between academic institutions and industry. All sponsors will be acknowledged on the competition web site as well as in press releases and at events related to the competition; they will have the opportunity to interact with some of Canada's best and brightest students in AI and intelligent systems; they will be invited to participate in a reception following the award ceremony, to be held in conjunction with the 2009 Intelligent Systems Collaborative Conference in Kelowna, BC.

Media information:

Gary Gudbranson
Precarn Incorporated
1525 Carling Avenue, Suite 510
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada K1Z 8R9
Tel: (613) 727-9576
Cell: (613) 720-3769
Fax: (613) 727-5672

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Intelligent Systems Challenge Targets Illegal Operations at Sea

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