The MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit corporation chartered to
work solely in the public interest, invites academic institutions,
commercial companies, government laboratories, and individuals
to participate in its inaugural MITRE Challenge™. Developed by
MITRE, the Challenge is an ongoing, open competition to encourage innovation in technologies of interest to the federal government.
As an operator of federally funded research and
development centers (FFRDCs) that support various government
agencies, MITRE maintains an objective, independent point of view
with regard to industry in order to make unbiased recommendations
to its U.S. government sponsors. FFRDCs support their sponsors
across a full spectrum of planning and concept development, R&D, and
systems acquisition. To ensure the highest levels of objectivity, FFRDCs
do not manufacture products, compete with industry, or work for
commercial companies.
The current Challenge, the first in a series, 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.
The task is to match a query file and an index file, each containing a list of names, against one another and produce a list of scored matches for each query name. Participants will receive a dataset and task guidelines, submit responses, and receive immediate feedback on their performance.
Technical expertise for Challenge #1: Multicultural Name Matching provided by MITRE's Identity Matching Lab.
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Team Name Selection
Participants choose the name of their team. The names of the best performing teams will be posted on a continuously updated leaderboard.
Timeframe
The MITRE Challenge launched in winter 2011 and closed on September 7, 2011.
Contact
For more information, contact mitrechallenge@mitre.org.
General Terms and Conditions
Click to learn more about the Terms and Conditions of the MITRE Challenge competition.
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Take the Challenge! |
Participant Benefits
- Receive a realistic dataset, which can be used for system verification.
- Receive objective evaluation metrics, including F measure, F measure weighted for precision and for recall, and Mean Average Precision (MAP), to guide system improvements.
- Receive publicity on the leaderboard for well-performing algorithms. Only team names, which are self-selected, will be shown publicly on the site.
- Gain visibility: Evaluation results, including each team's identity, will be shared with potential customers interested in this technology.
- Obtain immediate feedback: Teams' results are automatically verified and scored.
- Develop cutting-edge solutions to a variety of challenges.
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