Call for Participation: KDD Cup 2008 and the Workshop on Mining Medical Data

KDD Cup is the first and the oldest data mining competition, and is an integral part of the annual ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). Based on data provided by Siemens Medical Solutions USA, this year's KDD Cup competition focuses on the early detection of breast cancer from X-ray images of the breast. We are looking forward to an interesting competition and your participation. We particularly encourage the participation of students.

There are 2 different parallel options for participating:

1. Submit entries to the KDD Cup competition
2. Paper submissions for the associated Workshop on Mining Medical Data

Further details on each option are provided below.

KDD Cup 2008

Siemens Medical Solutions is proud to provide the data for the KDD Cup 2008 competition. The competition focuses on the early detection of breast cancer from X-ray images of the breast. There are two specific tasks, selected to be interesting to participants from academia and industry. The tasks are described in detail at www.kddcup2008.com. You can choose to compete in either or both of the tasks. The training data can be downloaded after April 3, 2008. Important dates are listed below.

Workshop on Mining Medical Data

We invite the submission of papers related to mining medical data. Participants in the KDD Cup 2008 may optionally submit papers to this workshop describing their entry. However, the workshop is broader in scope, and we also welcome other submissions related to the mining of medical data from structured sources such as structured databases and from unstructured data sources such as medical images, textual notes, etc. We particularly invite papers describing systems that are able to combine all available patient information whether from structured sources or from unstructured sources, to support medical decision making. All submitted papers will be evaluated by the workshop program committee based on scientific merits and novelty as perceived by the committee. Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings. Authors of the accepted papers are required to present their papers at the workshop. Depending on interest, a subset of the selected papers may also be published in a special issue of a journal later on. Important dates are listed below. All submitted papers must be in PDF format, must be restricted to 4 pages, and must use the template found at http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates.