SMP Challenge @ACM MM 2017

Social Media Prediction Challenge (SMP Challenge) of ACM MM 2017

Abstract
People are interested in predicting the future. For example, which films will bomb or who will win the upcoming Grammy awards? Making predictions about the future is not only fun matters but can bring real value to those who correctly predict the course of world events, such as which stocks are the best purchases for short-term gains. Predictive analytics is thus a field that has attracted major attention in both academia and the industry. As social media has become an inseparable part of modern life, there has been increasing interest in research of leveraging and exploiting social media as an information source for inferring rich social facts and knowledge. In this talk, we will address an interesting and challenging problem in social media research, i.e., predicting social media popularity. We aim to discover which image posts on social media are the “stars of tomorrow”, those will be the most engaging for social media audiences, e.g., receiving the most likes.

Therefore, as a joint activity with the research teams from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Academia Sinica (AS), and Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), we are releasing a large-scale social media dataset for sociological understanding and predictions, namely Social Media Prediction (SMP) dataset, with over 850K posts and 80K users in total. Our goal is to make the SMP dataset as varied and rich as possible to thoroughly represent the social media “world”.

Participation
The Challenge is a team-based contest. Each team can have one or more members, and an individual can not be a member of multiple teams. At the end of the Challenge, all teams will be ranked based on both objective evaluation and human evaluation. The top three performing teams will receive award certificates and/or cash prizes. At the same time, all accepted submissions are qualified for the conference’s grand challenge award competition.