This challenge is open to African pariticpants.
Due to the widespread noise pollution in our cities, data sponsors Sunbird AI recognised a need to gather data on noise exposure, in order to produce an action plan and empower citizens to be vigilant in tracking and monitoring noise.
The challenge is to train a noise classification model to classify noise into different categories.
About DataFest Africa (datafest.africa)
DataFest Africa (formally Datafest Kampala) is an annual event by Pollicy to demystify, learn about, and celebrate data in the Africa region. This year’s edition will be hosted under the theme ‘Big data, little data and everything between’ to scan how data of all magnitudes and from different players is collected, regulated, and used towards improved service delivery. Big data and little data have both been proven to revolutionise industry, politics, and social enterprises in Africa and the world over.
About Pollicy (pollicy.org)
Pollicy, the DataFest Africa organiser and main host, is a feminist-led civic technology organization working at the intersection of data, design, and technology. We provide design consulting to re-engineer civic engagement and participatory processes, technology solutions for communication, and research services to better understand what works within each African local context.
About Sunbird AI (sunbird.ai)
At Sunbird AI, we want to provide leadership in AI for social good throughout Africa. In particular, we aim for leadership by example: we develop open systems that can be replicated or expanded by others. For this to happen, we are committed to open source and open research, so that others can build on what we are doing.
Sunbird AI has a practical focus, and systems development work is in response to a specific need from partner organisations. Our projects start life in discussion with local partner organisations, where we assess if technology can be used practically, ethically and usefully to solve a problem. Not all of our projects involve building systems for end users, though. We are also interested in creating the resources (e.g. software or datasets) which enable others to create practical AI systems. We also aim to be a neutral source of advice for African institutions on the practical possibilities, benefits and risks of AI technology.
For example, the ethics of artificial intelligence is a complex and rapidly evolving field, where it is necessary to evaluate biases, privacy concerns, and factors in data technology: as well as maintaining ethical standards on our own projects, we wish to help other organisations to do so. We are also committed to building African technical capacity, in order to have a team who understands both the social context and also the technological opportunities.
Ministry of ICT and National Guidance
The Ministry of Information and Communications Technology and National Guidance was established in June 2006 with a mandate of providing strategic and technical leadership, overall coordination, support, and advocacy on all matters of policy, laws, regulations, and strategy for the ICT sector. It also ensures sustainable, efficient, and effective development, harnessing, and utilization of ICT in all spheres of life to enable the country to achieve its national development goals.
National ICT Innovation Hub
The National ICT Innovation Hub was set up by the Government of Uganda, through the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance to primarily establish an environment for ICT innovators facing challenges of workspace and internet connectivity. Besides the workspaces which can sit over 100 users at a go, the innovation hub also consists of meeting/presentation rooms, a boardroom, and a 350-seater auditorium for workshops and other events.
1st Place: $500 USD
2nd Place: $300 USD
3rd Place: $200 USD
There are 2000 Zindi points available.
This challenge starts on 7 July 2022 at 7AM GMT.
Competition closes on 26 July 2022. Final submissions must be received by 11:59 AM GMT.
The top 3 teams will be contacted by DataFest to present their solutions during the closing ceremony on 27 July 2022.
We reserve the right to update the contest timeline if necessary.
This challenge is open to African pariticpants.
Teams and collaboration
You may participate in competitions as an individual or in a team of up to four people. When creating a team, the team must have a total submission count less than or equal to the maximum allowable submissions as of the formation date. A team will be allowed the maximum number of submissions for the competition, minus the total number of submissions among team members at team formation. Prizes are transferred only to the individual players or to the team leader.
Multiple accounts per user are not permitted, and neither is collaboration or membership across multiple teams. Individuals and their submissions originating from multiple accounts will be immediately disqualified from the platform.
Code must not be shared privately outside of a team. Any code that is shared, must be made available to all competition participants through the platform. (i.e. on the discussion boards).
The Zindi data scientist who sets up a team is the default Team Leader but they can transfer leadership to another data scientist on the team. The Team Leader can invite other data scientists to their team. Invited data scientists can accept or reject invitations. Until a second data scientist accepts an invitation to join a team, the data scientist who initiated a team remains an individual on the leaderboard. No additional members may be added to teams within the final 5 days of the competition or last hour of a hackathon.
The team leader can initiate a merge with another team. Only the team leader of the second team can accept the invite. The default team leader is the leader from the team who initiated the invite. Teams can only merge if the total number of members is less than or equal to the maximum team size of the competition.
A team can be disbanded if it has not yet made a submission. Once a submission is made individual members cannot leave the team.
All members in the team receive points associated with their ranking in the competition and there is no split or division of the points between team members.
Datasets and packages
The solution must use publicly-available, open-source packages only. You may use only the datasets provided for this competition. Automated machine learning tools such as automl are not permitted.
You may use pretrained models as long as they are openly available to everyone.
The data used in this competition is the sole property of Zindi and the competition host. You may not transmit, duplicate, publish, redistribute or otherwise provide or make available any competition data to any party not participating in the Competition (this includes uploading the data to any public site such as Kaggle or GitHub). You may upload, store and work with the data on any cloud platform such as Google Colab, AWS or similar, as long as 1) the data remains private and 2) doing so does not contravene Zindi’s rules of use.
You must notify Zindi immediately upon learning of any unauthorised transmission of or unauthorised access to the competition data, and work with Zindi to rectify any unauthorised transmission or access.
Your solution must not infringe the rights of any third party and you must be legally entitled to assign ownership of all rights of copyright in and to the winning solution code to Zindi.
Submissions and winning
You may make a maximum of 10 submissions per day.
You may make a maximum of 300 submissions for this competition.
Before the end of the competition you need to choose 2 submissions to be judged on for the private leaderboard. If you do not make a selection your 2 best public leaderboard submissions will be used to score on the private leaderboard.
During the competition, your best public score will be displayed regardless of the submissions you have selected. When the competition closes your best private score out of the 2 selected submissions will be displayed.
Zindi maintains a public leaderboard and a private leaderboard for each competition. The Public Leaderboard includes approximately 20% of the test dataset. While the competition is open, the Public Leaderboard will rank the submitted solutions by the accuracy score they achieve. Upon close of the competition, the Private Leaderboard, which covers the other 80% of the test dataset, will be made public and will constitute the final ranking for the competition.
Note that to count, your submission must first pass processing. If your submission fails during the processing step, it will not be counted and not receive a score; nor will it count against your daily submission limit. If you encounter problems with your submission file, your best course of action is to ask for advice on the Competition’s discussion forum.
If you are in the top 10 at the time the leaderboard closes, we will email you to request your code. On receipt of email, you will have 2 hours to respond and submit your code following the submission guidelines detailed below. Failure to respond will result in disqualification.
If your solution places 1st, 2nd, or 3rd on the final leaderboard, you will be required to submit your winning solution code to us for verification, and you thereby agree to assign all worldwide rights of copyright in and to such winning solution to Zindi.
If two solutions earn identical scores on the leaderboard, the tiebreaker will be the date and time in which the submission was made (the earlier solution will win).
If the error metric requires probabilities to be submitted, do not set thresholds (or round your probabilities) to improve your place on the leaderboard. In order to ensure that the client receives the best solution Zindi will need the raw probabilities. This will allow the clients to set thresholds to their own needs.
The winners will be paid via bank transfer, PayPal, or other international money transfer platform. International transfer fees will be deducted from the total prize amount, unless the prize money is under $500, in which case the international transfer fees will be covered by Zindi. In all cases, the winners are responsible for any other fees applied by their own bank or other institution for receiving the prize money. All taxes imposed on prizes are the sole responsibility of the winners. The top 3 winners or team leaders will be required to present Zindi with proof of identification, proof of residence and a letter from your bank confirming your banking details.Winners will be paid in USD or the currency of the competition. If your account cannot receive US Dollars or the currency of the competition then your bank will need to provide proof of this and Zindi will try to accommodate this.
Payment will be made after code review and an introductory call with the host.
You acknowledge and agree that Zindi may, without any obligation to do so, remove or disqualify an individual, team, or account if Zindi believes that such individual, team, or account is in violation of these rules. Entry into this competition constitutes your acceptance of these official competition rules.
Zindi is committed to providing solutions of value to our clients and partners. To this end, we reserve the right to disqualify your submission on the grounds of usability or value. This includes but is not limited to the use of data leaks or any other practices that we deem to compromise the inherent value of your solution.
Zindi also reserves the right to disqualify you and/or your submissions from any competition if we believe that you violated the rules or violated the spirit of the competition or the platform in any other way. The disqualifications are irrespective of your position on the leaderboard and completely at the discretion of Zindi.
Please refer to the FAQs and Terms of Use for additional rules that may apply to this competition. We reserve the right to update these rules at any time.
Reproducibility of submitted code
Data standards:
Consequences of breaking any rules of the competition or submission guidelines:
Monitoring of submissions