MITRE Launches Challenge: Invites Ideas from Industry, Academia, and Individuals

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

MCLEAN, Va., January 18, 2011 — The MITRE Corporation today announced the launch of The MITRE Challenge™—an ongoing, open competition to encourage innovation in technologies of interest to the federal government.

The contest is open to academic institutions, commercial companies, government laboratories, and individuals. Challenge #1 entails multicultural name matching—a technology that is a key component of identity matching, which involves measuring the similarity of database records referring to people. Uses include verifying eligibility for Social Security or medical benefits, identifying and reunifying families in disaster relief operations, vetting persons against a travel watchlist, and merging or eliminating duplicate records in databases. Person name matching can also be used to improve the accuracy and speed of document searches, social network analysis, and other tasks in which the same person might be referred to by multiple versions or spellings of a name.

Challenge participants are required to match a query file and an index file, each containing a list of names, against one another to produce a list of scored matches for each query name. Registered teams receive a dataset and task guidelines, submit responses, and receive immediate feedback on their performance. The names of the best performing teams will be posted on a continuously updated leaderboard.

The team that produces a reproducible result that demonstrates the greatest performance improvement over the baseline algorithm will be declared the winner and will have an opportunity to present at a MITRE/government technical exchange meeting.

Challenge #1 begins today and runs through spring 2011. Subsequent challenges—including image analysis, signal processing, and privacy enhancing technologies/anonymization—are planned.

"I'm excited about tapping into the best minds to uncover solutions to real-world challenges facing federal government agencies," said Keith J. Miller, principal artificial intelligence engineer and project leader of the Challenge. "The benefits of this first contest range from increased capability to spot terrorists before they board a plane to greater ability to eliminate fraud in Social Security payments. Our hope is that the spirit of collegial competition will fast-track the development of critical innovations."

Learn more about The MITRE Challenge at http://www.mitre.org/challenge/.

About The MITRE Corporation

The MITRE Corporation (www.mitre.org) is a not-for-profit organization that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government. It operates federally funded research and development centers for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Homeland Security, with principal locations in Bedford, Mass., and McLean, Va.

In order to ensure the highest levels of objectivity, FFRDCs are organized as independent entities with limitations and restrictions on their activities. They are prohibited from manufacturing products, competing with industry, or working for commercial companies.

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