The Sixth DIMACS Implementation Challenge:
Near Neighbor Searches


In conjunction with its Special Year on Massive Data Sets, the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) invites participation in an Implementation Challenge focusing on Near Neighbor Searches. The Implementation Challenge will take place between January 1998 and January 1999. Participants are invited to carry out research projects related to the problem area and to present research papers at a DIMACS workshop to be held on January 15, 1999 (see Workshop Information). A refereed workshop proceedings will be published as part of the AMS-DIMACS book series.

Finding near neighbors according to various distance measures arises in many application areas, including but not limited to finding similar web documents, images, DNA sequences, lines of text, or audio and video clips, and more generally in areas of statistics, data mining, information retrieval, pattern recognition and data compression. The goal of the Implementation Challenge is to determine how algorithms depend on the structure of the underlying data sets, as well as to determine realistic algorithm performance where worst case analysis is overly pessimistic and probabilistic models are too unrealistic. We invite research projects in the following two directions.

Providing Interesting Data Sets and Distance Measures. We invite researchers from various application areas to provide interesting data sets for near neighbor problems. Contributions could consist either of sample data sets from a true application or of realistic instance generators resembling practical data sets. Our goal is to construct a library of test problems that will be available for study both during and after the Challenge.

Developing Near Neighbor Algorithms. Neighbor algorithms may be developed either for specific application domains or for more general spaces. Algorithms may aim to find the nearest neighbor, several nearest neighbors, or approximate neighbors. Projects may involve either public domain or proprietary codes.


Contents:

  • Call for Participation [ html, Postscript, ASCII ]
  • General Information (detailed) [ html, Postscript ]
  • Workshop Information [ html ]
  • Instructions for Full Paper Submissions [ html ]
  • Near Neighbor Bibliography [ html, Postscript, bibtex ]
    (please send mail to add other papers to this list)
  • Developers Guide [ html, Postscript ]
  • Software Collection [ html, ftp ]
  • List of Participants [ html ]
  • Related Links and Announcements [ html ]

  • Steering Committee:
    Michael Goldwasser, Coordinator, Princeton University
    Jon Bentley, Bell Labs
    Ken Clarkson, Bell Labs
    David Johnson, AT&T Labs
    Catherine McGeoch, Amherst College
    Robert Sedgewick, Princeton University

    Index Previous DIMACS Implementation Challenges.

    Index DIMACS Home Page.


    Maintained by Michael Goldwasser
    challenge6@dimacs.rutgers.edu
    Document last modified on May 26, 1999.