Rice is a staple crop in Egypt, but despite Egypt’s position as the top rice producer in Africa, it still relies on imports to meet the demands of its population. One of the main causes of this gap in Egypt is rice blast disease, which is responsible for 30% loss in rice production worldwide.
Early detection is the best way to manage crop diseases like rice blast, but rice blast is easily misclassified as brown spot disease - both are fungal diseases and have similar appearances in their early stage. With the current scarcity of experienced agricultural extension officers in the country, there is a clear case for recent technological advances in computer vision to help in early diagnosis, particularly by using multispectral images of crops.
The objective of this challenge is to predict the disease of a rice plant in RGB and Infrared images. Top solutions will receive money prizes and will be included in a joint publication with the organisers.
Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge
This competition is sponsored by Microsoft. All participants of this competition are required to create an account on the Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge platform.
Everyone that joins this competition and earns a relevant Microsoft certification will win an invitation to a special jobs fair co-hosted by Zindi and Microsoft, where you can meet companies across Africa and around the world looking to hire Azure-certified data scientists.
There are 100 Microsoft Certification Vouchers. To apply for a voucher, you need to submit a screenshot of you registered for the Cloud Skills Challenge and show that you are 90% complete with one of the courses. We will then distribute an exam voucher code.
Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge
The Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge is a fun, free and interactive skilling program that provides you with access to Microsoft skilling resources for your specific solution area! Gain access to Microsoft learn paths, virtual training days and a virtual leaderboard to compete with peers in the industry.
The Cloud Skills Challenge helps to skill you on Microsoft cloud technologies via a gamified experience using Microsoft Learn content.
Sign up to the challenge here!
Sign up for the Microsoft Azure Datathon Africa League.
The Microsoft Azure Datathon Africa League is a 40-day gamified learning experience centred around the Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge. This initiative will be driven in partnership with our developer communities along with organizations that specialize in skilling and building open-source data science projects. If the Datathon is closed keep an eye out for the next one!
We highly recommend the following certification programs:
Microsoft certified: Azure AI Fundamentals
Get a solid foundation in machine learning and AI concepts including computer vision, natural language processing, and conversational AI. This learning journey is designed for participants with both technical and nontechnical backgrounds. In about 10 hours, you'll learn how to create no-code predictive models, explore conversational AI, and so much more.
Get your discount on certification here!
Microsoft certified: Azure Data Scientist
Design and implement a data science solution on Azure. Learn how to build machine learning models, no-code predictive models, and ML solutions, and run data science workloads in the cloud. In almost 27 hours, you'll learn how to build and operationalize machine learning models using Microsoft Azure in a secure, scalable, and responsible way.
Get your discount on certification here!
About Data Science Africa (datascienceafrica.org)
DSA is a registered non-profit organization since 2019, and is based in Kenya. They aim at strengthening the African data science community, but they also welcome engaged expertise from the entire international community. In addition, They work on educating students on machine learning and data science methods. DSA is focussed on solutions to problems relevant to the African context, in particular emphasising affordability, sustainability and deployability.
About Nile University (nileuniversity.edu.ng)
Nile University (NU) was established in 2006 by a presidential decree as the first research-focused non-profit university in Egypt. NU is currently one of the leading research institutes in Egypt and has four specialized research centers inclduing the Center for Informatics Science (CIS) which specializes in research areas related to artificial intelligence, data and text mining, bioinformatics, medical imaging, and big data.
The evaluation metric for this challenge is the Log Loss.
Your submission file should look like:
Image_ID blast brown healthy id_3zpci62t81.jpg .034 .215 .567
1st Place: $1,500 USD
2nd Place: $900 USD
3rd Place: $600 USD
All participants of this competition are required to create an account on the Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge platform.
Everyone that joins this competition and earns a relevant Microsoft certification will win an invitation to a special jobs fair co-hosted by Zindi and Microsoft, where you can meet companies across Africa and around the world looking to hire Azure-certified data scientists.
There are 100 Microsoft Certification Vouchers. To apply for a voucher, you need to submit a screenshot of you registered for the Cloud Skills Challenge and show that you are 90% complete with one of the courses. We will then distribute an exam voucher code.
Competition closes on 14 August 2022.
Final submissions must be received by 11:59 PM GMT.
We reserve the right to update the contest timeline if necessary.
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. 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.
EITHER: 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.
OR: 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.
All participants of this competition are required to create an account on the Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge platform.
Everyone that joins this competition and earns a relevant Microsoft certification will win an invitation to a special jobs fair co-hosted by Zindi and Microsoft, where you can meet companies across Africa and around the world looking to hire Azure-certified data scientists.
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 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
Data standards:
Consequences of breaking any rules of the competition or submission guidelines:
Monitoring of submissions