Sergio Escalera & Ralf Herbrich 
The NeurIPS ’18 Competition [PDF ebook] 
From Machine Learning to Intelligent Conversations

This volume presents the results of the Neural Information Processing Systems Competition track  at the 2018 Neur IPS conference.  The competition follows the same format as the 2017 competition track for NIPS. Out of 21 submitted proposals, eight competition proposals were selected, spanning the area of Robotics, Health, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Systems and Physics. 

Competitions have become an integral part of advancing state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence (AI). They exhibit one important difference to benchmarks: Competitions test a system end-to-end rather than evaluating only a single component; they assess the practicability of an algorithmic solution in addition to assessing feasibility.

The eight run competitions aim at advancing the state of the art in deep reinforcement learning, adversarial learning, and auto machine learning, among others, including new applications for intelligent agents in gaming and conversational settings, energy physics, and prosthetics.