[AISWorld] ICDM'15 Call for Contest Participation

[Wenjun Zhou]

Drawbridge Cross-Device Connection Challenge

 http://icdm2015.stonybrook.edu/content/call-contest


Abstract:

In this contest participants are tasked with identifying a set of user
connections across different devices without using common user handle
information, such as name, email, phone number, etc., for the purpose of
proving that a technological, probabilistic approach to cross-device
identity is a viable alternative to relying on deterministic information.
The participants will be given various behavioral observations associated
with anonymous IDs that have been synthetized from different devices and
digital environments. Participants will then be asked to figure out the
likelihood that a set of different IDs from different domains belong to the
same user, and at what performance level.



General description of the problem, competition task, and evaluation
metrics:

It is very common for one user to have multiple unique identifiers across
different domains, including personal computing devices and mobile devices.
While those different device identifiers are seemingly disconnected, they
can illustrate more or less common behaviors across them, due to the fact
that they often belong to the same user. A common method for bridging these
device identifiers involves relying on deterministic identifiers, such as
names, email addresses, phone numbers, or other personal information. In
this contest, we are interested to see whether it is technically possible
to infer multiple device identifiers belonging to the same user using a
probabilistic approach, and the level of accuracy of those predictions. For
the above purpose, we have synthesized a set of desktop browser cookies,
say *C, *and another set of mobile device identifiers, say *D*, as two
specific examples of users’ digital identities on desktop and mobile
devices. We ask participants to use machine learning and data mining
methods to identify when a mobile device identifier, say *Di, *and a
desktop browser cookie, say C*j,* belong to the same user, without using
common deterministic user information. Specifically, for each mobile device
identifier *Di *in the set *D, *we want the participants to provide a
ranked list of desktop cookie *Ri,j* from the set C,based on the likelihood
that those desktop cookies belong to the same  user as device *Di.
*Participants
can use any methods they would like, as long as they provide the ranked
list. The submission will converted to a P-R curve based on the
ground-truth, and will be measured based on area under the curve (AUC)
metrics on the P-R curve.



Workshop:

There will be a workshop dedicated to the challenge, as part of the ICDM
conference program.



Contest Website:

https://www.kaggle.com/c/icdm-2015-drawbridge-cross-device-connections



Important dates:

Contest starts: June 1st

Contest ends: August 24th

Workshop paper initial submission due: September 7th

Workshop paper feedback sent to author: September 14th



-- 
Wenjun Zhou, Assistant Professor
Business Analytics and Statistics
Haslam College of Business
University of Tennessee Knoxville

Address: 916 Volunteer Blvd., Room SMC 247, Knoxville, TN 37996-0532
Phone: (865) 974-9198
Email: wzhou4 at utk.edu or wzhou7 at gmail.com
Homepage: http://web.utk.edu/~wzhou4/
<http://www.linkedin.com/pub/wenjun-zhou/15/80b/662>