Online Coding Competition for Automated Whale and Dolphin Identification with $12,000 Prize from Kaggle

Kaggle is now accepting applications from participants who want to participate in training titled ‘Happywhale - Whale and Dolphin Identification’. Identification by natural markings via photographs—known as photo-ID—is a powerful tool for marine mammal science. It allows individual animals to be tracked over time and enables assessments of population status and trends. With your help to automate whale and dolphin photo-ID, researchers can reduce image identification times by over 99%.

Competition Theme:-

• In this competition, you’ll develop a model to match individual whales and dolphins by unique—but often subtle—characteristics of their natural markings. You'll pay particular attention to dorsal fins and lateral body views in image sets from a multi-species dataset built by 28 research institutions. The best submissions will suggest photo-ID solutions that are fast and accurate.
• If successful, you'll have a hand in building advanced technology to better understand and manage the impact on the world’s changing oceans. Previous automation attempts resulted in a global database of over 50,000 whales and an agreement with cruise ships to operate at a maximum speed of 11 mph in the most whale-rich region. 
• Your ideas to automate the identification of marine life will help overcome increasing human impacts on oceans, providing a critical tool for conservation science.

 Competition Timeline:-

• February 1, 2022 - Start Date.
• April 11, 2022 - Entry Deadline. 
• April 11, 2022 - Team Merger Deadline. This is the last day participants may join or merge teams.
• April 18, 2022 - Final Submission Deadline.
• All deadlines are at 11:59 PM UTC on the corresponding day unless otherwise noted.

• 1st Place - $12,000.
• 2nd Place - $8,000.
• 3rd Place - $5,000.

• To be eligible to enter the Competition, you must be:
• Registered account holder at Kaggle.com.
• The older of 18 years old or the age of majority in your jurisdiction of residence (unless otherwise agreed to by Competition Sponsor and appropriate parental/guardian consents have been obtained by Competition Sponsor).
• Not a resident of Crimea, so-called Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) or Luhansk People's Republic (LNR), Cuba, Iran, Syria, or North Korea.
• Not a person or representative of an entity under U.S. export controls or sanctions.
• Privately sharing code or data outside of teams is not permitted. It's okay to share code if made available to all participants on the forums.
• Team mergers are allowed and can be performed by the team leader. In order to merge, the combined team must have a total submission count less than or equal to the maximum allowed as of the Team Merger Deadline. The maximum allowed is the number of submissions per day multiplied by the number of days the competition has been running.
• The maximum team size is 5.
• You may submit a maximum of 5 entries per day.
• You may select up to 2 final submissions for judging.

About Kaggle:-

Kaggle, a subsidiary of Google LLC, is an online community of data scientists and machine learning practitioners. Kaggle got its start in 2010 by offering machine learning competitions and now also offers a public data platform, a cloud-based workbench for data science, and Artificial Intelligence education. Kaggle allows users to find and publish data sets, explore and build models in a web-based data-science environment, work with other data scientists and machine learning engineers, and enter competitions to solve data science challenges.

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