CALL FOR COMPETITIONS

We invite competition proposals for the 2017 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2017) in Denver, Colorado, USA. The main goal of the competitions is to provide a common ground for benchmarking of state-of-the art algorithms, to consolidate research and identify open problems in biometrics-related research areas. We solicit competition proposals on any topic of interest to the broader biometric community and strongly encourage proposals focusing on new emerging fields and open research questions that are able to attract a significant number of participants. Competition organizers having a strong track record in the field are especially welcome.

The deadline for submitting competition proposals is December 5th, 2016. Decisions will be circulated by December 9th, 2016.

COMPETITION PROPOSAL SUBMISSION
Competition proposals should be sent to the IJCB 2017 competition co-chairs, Clinton Fookes (c.fookes@qut.edu.au) and Vitomir Štruc (vitomir.struc@fe.uni-lj.si), with the email subject »IJCB 2017 Competition Proposal: [title of your competition]«. The proposal should include the following information to facilitate the decision process:

• Title of the competition.
• Names, affiliations, contact information, and a brief CV of the competition organizers.
• A list of three most relevant publications related to the competition for each organizer.
• Justification:
o Motivation for the competition, expected outcomes and anticipated impact,
o Relevance to IJCB 2017,
o Relationship to previous competitions, if any,
o Description of the novelty of the competition.
• Execution:
o Description of the dataset(s) used for the competition and the available annotations,
o Details on the experimental protocol and result generation/submission procedure,
o Information on the platform used (for data sharing, submission, verification of the results), if any,
o Description of the evaluation criteria (performance metrics) and available baseline implementations/code (e.g., a starter kit).
• Organization:
o Expected minimum number of external participants (next to the organizers),
o Plan for promoting the competition and attracting participants,
o Description of the planned coordination activities,
o A detailed timeline for the competition.
• Other relevant information.

SCHEDULE
The competitions should preferably start in January or early February 2017 and be completed by the summary-paper submission deadline on May 20th, 2017. Competition organizers will also be requested to prepare a web page for the competition, which will be linked from the conference web site. The web-site should be online before the start of the competition.

PROCEEDINGS AND PRESENTATION
Competition organizers will be invited to submit a summary paper discussing organization, datasets, and results by May 20th, 2017. The summary papers will be considered for inclusion in the IJCB 2017 conference program and should follow the same formatting and presentation rules as regular papers. The submissions will undergo the same review process as regular papers. The presentation format (if accepted) will be determined based on the quality of the submission and reviewer feedback received. Accepted summary papers will be included in the proceedings of IJCB 2017 and send for inclusion in IEEE Xplore.

IMPORTANT DATES
Deadline for submitting proposals: December 5th, 2016
Decisions to organizers: December 9th, 2016
Submission of summary papers: May 20th, 2017