Each year the ACM hosts a truly international programming contest – the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Dating back to a contest held by Texas A&M University in 1970, this annual event, along with the associated regional contests, has grown to 5,606 teams from 1,733 universities in 84 countries (in the year 2006). Despite the maturity of the event, and the number of competi...

This paper describes an entry to the Multi-Agent Programming Contest 2008. The approach employs the pre-existing Agent Factory framework and extends this framework in line with experience gained from its use within the robotics domain.

The Arc Segmentation Contest, as the fourth in the series of graphics recognition contests organized by IAPR TC10, was held in association with the GREC’2001 workshop. In this paper we present the extended summary of the contest: the contest rules, performance metrics, test images and their ground truths, and the outcomes.

As an important issue in the field of innovation contest, performance of innovation contest has been attracting the attention of both academics and practioners over recent years. This paper explores the factors influencing performance of online innovation contest from the design elements perspective. The study is based on the empirical research of the online innovation contest community studio....

Research on the role of sexual selection in the speciation process largely focuses on the diversifying role of mate choice. In particular, much attention has been drawn to the fact that population divergence in mate choice and in the male traits subject to choice directly can lead to assortative mating. However, male contest competition over mates also constitutes an important mechanism of sexu...

of the Thesis In the literature on contests, punishments have received much less attention than prizes. One possible reason is that punishing the bottom player(s) in a contest where all contestants are not allowed to quit, while e¤ective in increasing contestants’total e¤ort, often violates individual rationality constraints. But what will happen in an open contest where all potential contestan...

Interventions using either contests or norms can promote environmental behavioral change. Yet research on the implications of contest-based and norm-based interventions is lacking. Based on Goal-framing theory, we suggest that a contest-based intervention frames a gain goal promoting intensive but instrumental behavioral engagement. In contrast, the norm-based intervention was expected to frame...

We study self-selection into contests among a large population of heterogeneous agents. We show that entry into the “richer” contest (in terms of show-up fees, number or value of prizes) is non-monotone in ability. Entry into the more meritocratic (i.e., discriminatory) contest exhibits two interior extrema. Other testable predictions of our model are: 1) All else equal, the more meritocratic c...

Crowdsourcing is known as a problem-solving strategy enabled by Web 2.0 evolution and socio-technical systems. Crowdsourcing contest is a typical case of crowdsourcing and has been adopted by many organizations for business solution and decision-making. From a participant’s perspective, it is interesting to explore what motivates people to participate in crowdsourcing contest. The focus of this...

This paper summarises the Agent Contest 2008, organised in association with ProMAS’08. The aim of the contest is to stimulate research in the area of multi-agent systems by identifying key problems and collecting suitable benchmarks that can serve as milestones for evaluating new tools, models, and techniques to develop multi-agent systems. The first two editions of this contest were organised ...