AI for Equity Challenge: Climate Action, Gender, & Health - Full Challenge Rules

The AI for Equity Challenge: Climate Action, Gender, and Heath (“Contest”) will be hosted by Zindi, Inc. (“Zindi”),  and sponsored by Amazon Web Services, Inc. and its affiliates (“AWS”), and the International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence (“IRCAI”, and together with Zindi and AWS, “Partners”).

Description of Contest

From September 24, 2024 09:00 GMT to November 4, 2024 23:59 GMT (“Round One”), submit a technical proposal to use AI to solve a challenge at the nexus of climate change, gender equity and health (“Submission”) for a chance to win a share of $50,000 in AWS credits and technical support, and state of the art AI model solutions.  

From November 4, 2024 to December 2, 2024, an expert committee of judges jointly appointed by all partners will select 2 winning Submissions that will be published as challenges for the data science community (each, a “Challenge”). The winners (“Challenge Owners”) will be announced prior to the start of Round Two (defined below), and will assist Zindi, AWS and IRCAI in developing the Challenges including but not limited technical assistance, dataset preparation, and challenge design.

From December 2, 2024 09:00 GMT to January 31, 2025 23:59 GMT (“Round Two”), develop and submit an AI-powered solution to one of the Challenges (a “Solution”) for a chance to win a share of $25,000 in cash and $50,000 in AWS credits. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY.  VOID WHERE PROHIBITED. Purchases from the Partners will not increase the chance of winning the Contest.

Rules

By participating in the Contest, you agree to be bound by these Rules. Must be at least 18 years of age. Exclusions – The following are not eligible: (i) individuals located in or resident of countries or territories subject to U.S. sanctions, including: Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and the territory of Crimea, and the so-called Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk; and (ii) individuals designated on, or working on behalf of or at the direction of any person designated on, the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List, the Denied Persons List, or other similar lists maintained by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control or the Bureau of Industry and Security. Partners, employees of Partners, and their immediate family members and members of their households are not eligible to participate in the Contest.

Round One Rules

During Round One of the Contest, Submissions will be collected by a secure webform hosted by IRCAI. Submissions are limited to one entry per person. In order to enter a Submission, teams must complete the form at https://ircai.org/round-one-proposal-submission-form/ in full, adhering to all Submission requirements.

After Round One submissions close, all eligible Submissions received during Round One will be judged and rated by a panel of qualified judges consisting of members of IRCAI and members of the NAIXUS network. Judging will take place between November 4, 2024 and December 2, 2024. The panel will judge Submissions per the following criteria:

• Sustainability impact and implementation feasibility: How likely is it that this project can be implemented and will have impact when implemented? Who is impacted and how?
• Addressing data gaps: Will the proposal and solution help fill gaps in data availability across climate action, gender and health equity that could be published back through ASDI for public benefit?
• Need and novelty: What is new about what you’re proposing? Will the proposal and solution help fill gaps in data availability across climate action, gender and health equity that could be published back through ASDI for public benefit?
• Scale and scalability: Is this something that affects 500 or 5 million people? Is there a strong need from the team for this support, or a strong need in the community/sector for the project that is proposed?
• Dataset quality and relevance: Is this dataset or datasets usable for the second round? And how relevant is it to the subject of the challenge? Proposals that make use of AWS services should be recognised more highly here.
• Team: Are the individuals and organisations involved well suited to this challenge, able to collaborate, and well positioned to implement, well represented towards mitigating bias (or partnerships to assist)?
• Minimum requirements met: For example, does the proposal clearly indicate at least one dataset from ASDI that would be used to solve the problem? Proposals must plan to leverage at least one dataset made available through the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI).
• Bias: Were reasonable efforts made to avoid social, statistical, and bias in conceptualisation and implementation of this proposal? Have the datasets been reviewed for bias, and have steps been taken to mitigate the sources of bias to the extent possible?
• Use of generative AI: Is there evidence that the majority of the creative and cognitive work of the proposal relied on generative AI tools?

Round Two Rules

Teams and collaboration

You may participate in the Challenges as an individual or in a team of up to four people. Multiple accounts per user are not permitted, and neither is collaboration or membership across multiple teams. Individuals and their Submissions or Solutions originating from multiple accounts will be immediately disqualified from the platform.

Code must not be shared privately outside of a team. Any code that is shared, must be made available to all Contest participants through the platform. (i.e. on the discussion boards).

The team member who sets up a team on the Zindi platform (“Team Leader”) can transfer leadership to another participant on the team. The Team Leader can invite other participants to their team. Invited participants can accept or reject invitations. Until a second participant accepts an invitation to join a team, the participant who initiated a team remains an individual on the leaderboard. No additional members may be added to teams within the final 5 days of the Contest.

The Team Leader can initiate a merge with another team. Only the Team Leader of the second team can accept the invite. The default Team Leader is the leader from the team who initiated the invite. Teams can only merge if the total number of members is less than or equal to the maximum team size of the Contest.

A team can be disbanded if it has not yet made a Submission. Once a Submission is made individual members cannot leave the team.

All members in the team receive points associated with their ranking in the Challenges and there is no split or division of the points between team members.

Datasets and packages

The Solution must use publicly-available, open-source packages only.

If the Challenge is a computer vision challenge, image metadata (Image size, aspect ratio, pixel count, etc.) may not be used in your  Solution.

You may use only the datasets provided for the Challenges. Automated machine learning tools such as automl are not permitted.  Teams are strongly encouraged to build their Solutions on AWS AI services and infrastructure.

You may use pretrained models as long as they are openly available to everyone.

You are allowed to access, use and share data received as part of a Challenge for any commercial, non-commercial, research or education purposes, under a CC-BY SA 4.0 license.

You must notify Zindi immediately upon learning of any unauthorised transmission of or unauthorised access to any such data, and work with Zindi to rectify any unauthorised transmission or access.

Your Solution must not infringe the rights of any third party and you must be legally entitled to assign ownership of all rights of copyright in and to the winning Solution code to the Challenge Owners.

Submitting Solutions

You may submit a maximum of 10 Submissions per day.

You may make a maximum of 200 Submissions for each Challenge. Teams must have a total Submissions count less than or equal to the maximum allowable Submissions as of the formation date. A team will be allowed to submit the maximum number of Solutions for the competition, minus the total number of Submissions among team members at team formation.

Before the end of the Challenge, you need to choose 2 Submissions to be judged on for the private leaderboard. If you do not make a selection, your 2 best public leaderboard Submissions will be used to score on the private leaderboard. Entries that do not meet the requirements set forth in these Rules may be disqualified in any Partner’s sole discretion.

During the Challenge, your best public score will be displayed regardless of the Submissions you have selected. When the Challenge closes your best private score out of the 2 selected Submissions will be displayed.

Zindi maintains a public leaderboard and a private leaderboard for each competition. The public leaderboard includes approximately 20% of the test dataset. While the Challenge is open, the public leaderboard will rank Submissions by the accuracy score they achieve. Upon close of the Challenge, the private leaderboard will be made public and will constitute the final ranking for the Challenge.

Note that to count, your Solution must first pass processing. If your Solution fails during the processing step, it will not be counted and not receive a score; nor will it count against your daily Solution limit. If you encounter problems with your Solution file, your best course of action is to ask for advice on the Challenge’s discussion forum.

The leaderboard will be closed, on January 31, 2025.  If you are in the top 10 at the time the leaderboard closes, we will email you to request your code. On receipt of email, you will have 48 hours to respond and submit your code following the Reproducibility of submitted code guidelines detailed below. Failure to respond will result in disqualification.

If your solution places 1st, 2nd, or 3rd on the final leaderboard, you will be required to submit your winning Solution code to us for verification, and you thereby agree to assign all worldwide rights of copyright in and to such winning solution to the Challenge Owner(s).

If two Solutions earn identical scores on the leaderboard, the tiebreaker will be the date and time in which the Solution was submitted (the Solution submitted earlier  will win).

Reproducibility of submitted code

• If your submitted code does not reproduce your score on the leaderboard, we reserve the right to adjust your rank to the score generated by the code you submitted.
• If your code does not run you will be dropped from the top 10. Please make sure your code runs before submitting your Solution.
• Always set the seed. Rerunning your model should always place you at the same position on the leaderboard. When running your Solution, if randomness shifts you down the leaderboard we reserve the right to adjust your rank to the closest score that your Solution reproduces.
• Custom packages in your submission notebook will not be accepted.
• You may only use tools available to everyone i.e. no paid services or free trials that require a credit card.

Documentation

A README markdown file is required in order to participate in the Challenge. It should cover:

• How to set up folders and where each file is saved
• Order in which to run code
• Explanations of features used
• Environment for the code to be run (conda environment.yml file or an environment.txt file)
• Hardware needed (e.g. Google Colab or the specifications of your local machine)
• Expected run time for each notebook. This will be useful to the review team for time and resource allocation.

Your code needs to run properly, code reviewers do not have time to debug code. If code does not run easily you will be bumped down the leaderboard.

Monitoring of Solutions

• We will review the top 10 Solutions of the Contest.
• We reserve the right to request code from any user at any time during the Contest. You will have 24 hours to submit your code following the rules for code review (see above). Zindi reserves the right not to explain our reasons for requesting code. If you do not submit your code within 24 hours you will be disqualified from winning the Contest, or any other competitions on Zindi,  and Zindi points for the next six months. If you fall under suspicion again and your code is requested and you fail to submit your code within 24 hours, your Zindi account will be disabled and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points with any other account.

Prizes and winning

Total prize pool

$25,000 cash prizes

$200,000 in AWS credit and technical support

Crowd-sourced custom AI solutions worth $50,000

Round One

The two winning proposals from Round One will be selected as the Challenges for Round Two. Each winning proposal will receive:

• 3x winning AI models (outputs of Round Two Challenges on Zindi)
• $25,000 in AWS credits to develop and deploy potential solutions
• Pairing with a team of technical mentors and domain expert researchers from AWS and IRCAI to help develop and deploy solutions

In addition, AWS will award a discretionary $2,500 in AWS credits to each of three runners’ up, and $1,000 in AWS credits to up to 10 additional runners’ up from Round One.

Round Two

The winners of each of the two final Challenges on Zindi will receive:

• 1st prize (1 winner per Challenge): $6,000 and $15,000 in AWS credits
• 2nd prize (1 winner per Challenge): $4,000 and  $7,500 in AWS credits
• 3rd prize (1 winner per Challenge): $2,500 and  $2,500 in AWS credits

The first 200 teams to sign up for the Round Two Challenges will receive AWS credits for cloud support to the value of $500.

If you are selected as a winner of Round One, Zindi or one of the Partners will contact you by the email address shared in your Submission before December 2, 2024. If you are selected as a winner of a Round Two Challenge, Zindi will contact you by your Zindi email address before February 12, 2025.

Prizes are transferred only to the individual users or to the Team Leader. Failure to provide the requested information or to respond to communications about the Challenges within a reasonable period of time, as determined by Zindi in its sole discretion, may result in the forfeiture of a prize.

AWS credits will be made available via the email address you submit to enter the Contest. Cash prizes will be paid via bank transfer, PayPal if payment is less than or equivalent to $100, or another recognized international money transfer platform. International transfer fees will be deducted from the total prize amount, unless the prize money is under $500, in which case the international transfer fees will be covered by Zindi. In all cases, the winners are responsible for any other fees applied by their own bank or other institution for receiving the prize money. All taxes imposed on prizes are the sole responsibility of the winners. The top winners or team leaders will be required to present Zindi with proof of identification, proof of residence and a letter from your bank confirming your banking details. Winners will be paid in USD. If your account cannot receive USD, then your bank will need to provide proof of this and Zindi will try to accommodate this. For Round One, Prizes will be awarded after the winners announcement on February 12, 2025.

For Round Two, payment will be made a maximum of 60 days after code review and sealing the leaderboard, and not before February 12, 2025.

By accepting a prize, you confirm that your receipt is neither prohibited nor inconsistent with any applicable laws, regulations, or binding orders, including applicable ethics or procurement rules, your receipt will not create a conflict of interest for Partners, and there are no ongoing competitive procurements for which your receipt of this benefit could conflict Partners from participating in the competition.

A winners list will be available at https://zindi.africa/ai-equity-challenge for up to a year after the winners have been publicly announced.  Acceptance of a prize by the winner constitutes permission for Zindi, IRCAI, and AWS to use winners’ names or likenesses, and city, state or province, and country, if submitted to the Contest, for any disclosures required by law, including a winners list, and for advertising and promotional purposes relating to the Contest in any and all media now or hereafter devised, worldwide in perpetuity (or to the maximum extent permissible under applicable law), without additional compensation, notification or permission, unless prohibited by law. AWS reserves the right to substitute a prize (or portion thereof) for an item of comparable or greater value, at AWS’s sole discretion.

Intellectual Property

By submitting any Submission or Solution to the Contest, you represent and warrant that (i) such Submission or Solution does not: (a) perform or promote activities that are illegal; (b) violate or infringe the intellectual property, proprietary, or other rights of others; (c) perform or promote activities that are offensive or disparaging in any manner; or (d) cause harm to others or to Partners’ operations or reputation; and (ii)  you are legally entitled to assign ownership of all rights of copyright in and to the winning Solution code to the Challenge Owners.

Excluding Submissions and Solutions, all intellectual property related to this Contest, including but not limited to copyrighted material, trademarks, trade-names, logos, designs, promotional materials, web pages, source codes, drawings, illustrations, slogans and representations are owned or used under license by one of the Partners. All rights are reserved. Unauthorized copying or use of any copyrighted material or intellectual property without the express written consent of its owners is strictly prohibited. Any use in a Submission or Solution of a Partner’s intellectual property shall be solely to the extent provided for in these Rules.

General

The Contest is sponsored and hosted  in collaboration by the Partners. The Partners reserves the right to cancel or modify the Contest at any time and for any reason. You acknowledge and agree that a Partner may, without any obligation to do so, remove or disqualify an individual, team, or account if the Partner believes that such individual, team, or account is in violation of these rules. Entry into this Contest constitutes your acceptance of these official Contest rules.

The following personal information will be collected by Zindi for the Contest solely for the purposes of administering the Contest and verifying participant eligibility: name, city, country,  and email address. Failure to provide all necessary personal information may result in participants’ participation in the Contest being deemed ineligible.

In addition, Zindi is committed to providing solutions of value to our clients and partners. To this end, Zindi reserves the right to disqualify your Solution on the grounds of usability or value. This includes but is not limited to the use of data leaks or any other practices that we deem to compromise the inherent value of your Solution.

A Partner also reserves the right to disqualify you and/or your Solutions from the Contest if such Partner believes that you violated the spirit of the Contest or the platform in any other way. The disqualifications are irrespective of your position on the leaderboard and completely at the discretion of the Partners.

The Partners, and their affiliates and licensors will not be liable to you under any cause of action or theory of liability relating to the Contest, even if a party has been advised of the possibility of such damages, for (a) indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or exemplary damages, or (b) lost profits, revenues, customers, opportunities, or goodwill. In any case, AWS and its affiliates’ and licensors’ aggregate liability under these Rules will not exceed USD $100. The limitations in this paragraph shall apply only to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law.

Any discrepancy or inconsistency between these Rules and disclosures or other statements contained in any Contest materials, these Rules shall prevail.

If at any time prior to the deadline, a participant or prospective participant believes that any provision in these Rules is or may be ambiguous, they must submit a written request for clarification.

A Partner’s failure to enforce any provision of these Rules shall not constitute a waiver of that provision. Should any provision of these Rules be or become illegal or unenforceable in any jurisdiction whose laws or regulations may apply to a participant, such illegality or unenforceability shall leave the remainder of these Rules, including the provision affected, to the fullest extent permitted by law, unaffected and valid. The illegal or unenforceable provision shall be replaced by a valid and enforceable provision that comes closest and best reflects Partners’ intention in a legal and enforceable manner with respect to the invalid or unenforceable provision.