An Overview of Competition Research

This section of the seminar focuses on the process of conducting research and is aimed at individuals who have experience with machine learning or data science projects but may be new to formal research. Many students in the OMSCS program possess strong analytical and technical skills from their professional careers that are directly transferable to applied research competitions. This guide is designed to bridge the gap between that practical experience and the structured process of academic and competition-based research.

The following chapters will walk through the essential soft skills required to navigate the research landscape. We will begin by outlining useful background knowledge before discussing how to choose a research venue, focusing on Kaggle, the CLEF Conference, and workshops associated with conferences like TREC, NTCIR, KDD, and NeurIPS. We will then cover how to perform a literature review to understand the current state of the art for a given problem.

Subsequently, we will detail how to develop a research proposal, a crucial step for anyone looking to lead or recruit for a team. A significant portion is dedicated to team formation, as assembling a group with the right mix of interests, skills, and time commitment is often the most challenging aspect of the process. While this guide will describe the paper writing process, it assumes some familiarity from a paper-heavy course. Please note that a deep dive into the specifics of conducting experiments is considered beyond the scope of this introductory seminar and is reserved for the active competition teams. This chapter provides the framework for identifying where you are on the research frontier and what opportunities are available to you.