Microsoft-sponsored data science competition

We are pleased to announce that a Microsoft-sponsored data science competition is now live on Kaggle!

The competition is also being hosted as a conference Cup by the Big Data Innovators Workshop (BIG), co-located with the WWW-2015 conference.

The Cup

The problem presented for the Cup is one of classifying malware files into their associated malware families, based on file content and characteristics.

Successful application of data science to malware-related problems is critical to mitigating the increasing risk of malware to every organization and individual online.

We hope that this competition will encourage scientists to invest resources in this extremely important, and rising, research field.

 

Microsoft Effort and Objectives

This One Microsoft undertaking, which has been maturing over the past year, is a joint effort between three organizations –  the Israel Microsoft Talent Acquisition Team (generously sponsoring $16k in prizes!), the Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) OneProtection and Microsoft Azure Machine Learning.

The Talent Acquisition Team’s goal is to expose the data science community to the exciting opportunities that the growing data science discipline at Microsoft offers.

The MMPC OneProtection team would like to enable published and repeatable research related to malware, and encourage research efforts to go in this direction. Cup winners are required to publish their methods.

The Azure Machine Learning brand is featured in the Cup’s site and communications, reaching a large and targeted audience of data scientists.

 

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank WWW-2105, and in particular to the BIG committee: Prof. Alessandro Panconesi  and Prof. Alessandro Mei from “Sapienza, University of Rome”, Prof. Jimmy Lin from U. Maryland, and Dr. Junlan Feng from China Mobile.

This would not have been possible without the invaluable scientific advice from Elad Yom Tov, Shay Kels, Daniel Radu, Gal Lavee, Nir Levy, and Noam Koenigstein, and the legal and procurement support from Zvi Friedman and Anat Noam-Rubinstein.

It would also not be possible without support and encouragement from our leadership – Anat Assaf, Yoram Yaacovi, Dennis Batchelder, Mario Goertzel and Elad Ziklik.

Special thanks Dr. William Cukierski from kaggle.com for his help.

 

Please help us spread the word!

 

Thanks,

Corina Feuerstein, Marian Radu, Royi Ronen, Anat Kigel