Rules

Next to the Code of Honor the following rules apply to the competition.

Eligibility

• The spotGEO challenge is open to everybody, including space experts, data-mining experts and citizen scientists.
• No nationality restrictions apply for the submission of solution files.
• No participant is allowed who has been directly or indirectly involved with the competition set-up and the dataset creation.

Final Ranking and Winner

• The final official ranking will be computed on the full test-set and published seven days after the competition deadline for all eligible teams.
• During the competition an indicative leaderboard will rank all submissions using an unkown subset of the test-set. Such a leaderboard has no use in determining the competition winner.
• To be eligible for the final ranking, a short summary statement in pdf describing the used algorithms and the solution approach (2-3 pages are sufficient) has to be sent by eMail to act AT esa.int within seven days of the competition end.
• The winner of the competition is determined by the lowest score in the final ranking.
• In case of a tie, the submission with lowest MSE wins. Should the tie still be unresolved, the earlier submission date wins.
• A jury made of 8 scientists will also peer-review the submitted pdf and may decide to award an additional prize to any of the eligible teams, the "Kelvins out-of-the-box thinking" award, based on the scientific novelty of the method used and regardless of the final rank achieved.
• The final decision on the winner is subject to whether the participants conformed to the rules as checked unilaterally by ESAs Advanced Concepts Team.
• Besides admiration and glory our sponsors have kindly agreed to award small monetary prized to highlight the participant achievments. These will be: Competition winner: 1300 EUR, Second 900 EUR, third 500 EUR. An additional 300 EUR will be reserved to the "Kelvins out-of-the-box thinking" award and can be cumulated with the main prizes.

License

By submitting, the authors grant to the organizers a license to use the submission files for the purpose of verifying and publishing the challenge results.

Submission

• The use of additional public data for training of machine learning models is allowed.
• Labeling images by hand or with any human assistance in the loop (e.g. crowdsourcing) is not allowed.
• Before the competition deadline, solutions, notebooks and code snippets may only be shared publicly. Private sharing between teams is thus not allowed.
• The submission limit is two submissions within 24 hours per team.
• The leaderboard during the competition uses only a part of the submission data. The complete submission data will be evaluated after the competition ends to compute the final ranking.

Teams

• Every team must submit with only one account.
• Merging teams is not allowed.