A common misconception of sign language is that it is the same everywhere; in reality there are as many as 300 different languages (approximately 50 of these from Africa) with new signs evolving each day as a need appears. Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) is used in Kenya and Somalia, and there are different dialects depending on what region you are in. It is used by over half of Kenya's estimated 600 000-strong deaf population.

The objective of this competition is to build a model to recognise ten different everyday KSL signs present in the images, using machine learning or deep learning algorithms.

This dataset was collected specifically for a Zindi competition. Almost all of the hands are hands of people of colour, in an effort to address bias in sign language datasets. In this effort, the dataset is a public good and open to all to use. We encourage all solutions and derivatives of this dataset to be shared publicly as a public good to the sector.

About Next Billion Users (nextbillionusers.google)

Task Mate is an early stage product from Google’s Next Billion Users (NBU) organization. It is a crowdsourcing data collection platform that enables businesses to connect with local ‘Taskers’ to create relevant, high-quality datasets that meet their needs. Task Mate helps businesses and organizations access diverse data, recognizing that quality and representation carry an elevated significance in AI, while providing flexible earning opportunities to Taskers.

The platform currently supports four primary data collection types - audio collection, image collection, text collection, and field tasks - and is currently live in India, Kenya, and Mexico.

We are currently in Beta, continuing to test and iterate the product as we learn more about how to best meet the needs of our customers and Taskers, alike.

About SDG10: Reduced Inequalities

Inequalities in income and wealth are severe and have been widening globally. The richest 1% of the world’s population now control up to 40% of global assets, while the poorest half owns just one per cent. Income equality between countries is higher than that within a large majority of countries, such that individual incomes are still largely associated with a person’s citizenship and location. Wide and often mutually reinforcing disparities are also evident within countries, including disparity in terms of: rural/urban disparities, household wealth, gender, ethnic minorities and indigenous people, migrant status, and disability.

Businesses are engines for economic growth, having the potential to create jobs, foster economic activity through their value chain, and contribute tax revenues for public services and infrastructure. However, business can also exacerbate inequality, and its structural drivers, including by being complicit in perpetuating biases and discrimination. All businesses have the responsibility to respect human rights. This includes adopting and implementing policies on respect for human rights including worker’s rights (collective bargaining, decent work conditions, etc.). In supply chains, one area to pay particular attention to is when third parties, such as recruitment agencies, are used to source labor. Such activity may place migrant workers at risk of exploitation such as forced labor and human trafficking, including where recruitment fees are charged to workers and where identity documents are retained. Thus, in addition to addressing their own impacts, businesses should use leverage to try to address adverse impacts with which they may be involved through third parties such as suppliers. Such leverage can also be used to encourage changes in policies and practices that may exclude workers based on factors such as age, gender, religious beliefs, national origin, or ethnicity.

Companies should engage governments in a transparent and accountable way, and disclose payments to governments. Whether through public policy dialogue or tax revenue, relationships between companies and governments are increasingly recognized as having a significant impact on human rights, which may exacerbate or improve inequality outcomes.

In addition to avoiding contributing to inequality, companies can also have a positive impact on addressing inequality through inclusive business models that provide empowerment for marginalized groups in the workplace, marketplace and community.

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 user who sets up a team is the default Team Leader. 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 the last hour of a hackathon, unless otherwise stated in the competition rules.

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. Your models should not use any of the metadata provided.

You may use only the datasets provided for this competition. Automated machine learning tools such as automl are not permitted.

If the challenge is a computer vision challenge, image metadata (Image size, aspect ratio, pixel count, etc) may not be used in your submission.

You may use pretrained models as long as they are openly available to everyone.

You are allowed to access, use and share competition data for any commercial,. non-commercial, research or education purposes, under a CC-BY SA 4.0 license.

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.

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 20 at the time the leaderboard closes, we will email you to request your code. On receipt of email, you will have 48 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

• If your submitted code does not reproduce your score on the leaderboard, we reserve the right to adjust your rank to the score generated by the code you submitted.
• If your code does not run you will be dropped from the top 10. Please make sure your code runs before submitting your solution.
• Always set the seed. Rerunning your model should always place you at the same position on the leaderboard. When running your solution, if randomness shifts you down the leaderboard we reserve the right to adjust your rank to the closest score that your submission reproduces.
• We expect full documentation. This includes:
• All data used
• Output data and where they are stored
• Explanation of features used
• A requirements file with all packages and versions used
• Your solution must include the original data provided by Zindi and validated external data (if allowed)
• All editing of data must be done in a notebook (i.e. not manually in Excel)
• Environment code to be run. (e.g. Google Colab or the specifications of your local machine)
• Expected run time for each notebook. This will be useful to the review team for time and resource allocation.

Data standards:

• Your submitted code must run on the original train, test, and other datasets provided.
• If external data is allowed, external data must be freely and publicly available, including pre-trained models with standard libraries. If external data is allowed, any data used should be shared with Zindi to be approved and then shared on the discussion forum. Zindi will also make note of the external data available on the data page.
• Packages:
• You must submit a requirements file with all packages and versions used.
• If a requirements file is not provided, solutions will be run on the most recent packages available.
• Custom packages in your submission notebook will not be accepted.
• You may only use tools available to everyone i.e. no paid services or free trials that require a credit card.

Consequences of breaking any rules of the competition or submission guidelines:

• First offence: No prizes for 6 months and 2000 points will be removed from your profile (probation period). If you are caught cheating, all individuals involved in cheating will be disqualified from the challenge(s) you were caught in and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions for the next six months and 2000 points will be removed from your profile. If you have less than 2000 points to your profile your points will be set to 0.
• Second offence: Banned from the platform. If you are caught for a second time your Zindi account will be disabled and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points using any other account.
• Teams with individuals who are caught cheating will not be eligible to win prizes or points in the competition in which the cheating occurred, regardless of the individuals’ knowledge of or participation in the offence.
• Teams with individuals who have previously committed an offence will not be eligible for any prizes for any competitions during the 6-month probation period.

Monitoring of submissions

• We will review the top 20 solutions of every competition when the competition ends.
• We reserve the right to request code from any user at any time during a challenge. You will have 24 hours to submit your code following the rules for code review (see above). Zindi reserves the right not to explain our reasons for requesting code. If you do not submit your code within 24 hours you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points for the next six months. If you fall under suspicion again and your code is requested and you fail to submit your code within 24 hours, your Zindi account will be disabled and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points with any other account.

The evaluation metric for this challenge is Log Loss.

Note that there are 9 classes. Values should be probabilities and can be between 0 and 1 inclusive. The probabilities do not need to add up to 1.

Your submission file should look like:

FILE           Church   Enough/Satisfied   Friend   ...
00G9CO1.jpeg      1           0              0
01TO3K4.jpeg      0.98        0.33           0.78                                         
01YAQRV.jpeg      0.10        0.56           0.21

1st Place: $2 500 USD

2nd Place: $1 500 USD

3rd Place: $1 000 USD

Competition closes on 27 February 2022.

Final submissions must be received by 11:59 PM GMT.

We reserve the right to update the contest timeline if necessary.