byDuan Yunfei fromSchool of Computer Science and Technology

Translated by Liu Xiuming edited by Chen Fuming

Time:2014-4-8 15:04:06 Click1984

HUST graduate delegation from School of Computer Science and technology got the first place honor in APCorr and the second in RMSE in the Crowd-souring Contest of the 2013 International TREC（Text Retrieval Conference）Evaluation Contest. With 52 colleges, universities or research institutes from 21 countries and regions competing in 8 evaluation tasks, the contest came to a close successfully this month. In the contest, HUST delegation creatively put forward specific strategies and solutions to crowd-souring fraud detection by psychological behavior analysis, which provides a theoretical basis and algorithm to the evaluation quality of crowd-souring.

TREC, one of the most popular and authoritative evaluation conferences in information retrieval, is co-sponsored by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Since the first conference in 1991, the number of the attendees has been increasing every year including MIT(Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Stanford University, UCB(University of California, Berkeley), Microsoft Research, Google, IBM Research, National University of Singapore, Taiwan University, Canadian Queen’s University, University of Tokyo, CUHK (Chinese University of Hong Kong), and London Metropolitan University etc and THU (Tsinghua University), Beijing University, Fudan University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, SJTU (Shanghai Jiaotong University), HIT (Harbin Institute of Technology), Dalian University of Technology, and BUPT(Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications) etc from mainland China. Supplied with standard corpuses, retrievals, query sets and evaluations by NIST, contestants are obliged to construct system and submit runs within the given time. NIST is in charge of evaluating the runs, conducting academic exchanges by holding conferences and publishing papers. According to the strict rules, delegations are not scored unless their runs are valuable, reliable and submitted within the given time, as a result, 52 out of the 145 delegations from 36 countries and regions were entitled to the contest this year. So far TREC has developed into one of the top international contests in information retrievals.

Overloaded as he was, professor Li Peng, an honor winner of “Young Elites of HUST”, proposed in 2012 to establish the Basic Academic Training Lab of those who got test-free graduate admission, so as to cultivate and improve their practical and scientific abilities, part of whose members formed HUST delegation of TREC evaluation contest. He volunteered to train those students who have got graduate qualification without examination and the seniors who intend to attend graduate school. He made a “four-ten” training program—mastery of 10 classic programs, grasp of 10 classic algorithms, attendance of 10 academic lectures and participation of 10 interactions. This great honor gained is a tested affirmation of the “four-ten” training program as well as a reward to the hard work of Professor Li Peng and his graduates.

Professor Li Peng thought highly of his students in our interview of him. “Being a contestant myself before, I am fully aware how difficult and influential the contest is.” he said, “Every year we have many top talented counterparts of doctoral graduates from world famous universities and organizations like MIT, Stanford University, UCB, Microsoft Research, Google and so on, while our contestants are no more than the rookies of the first-year graduates. Though they are at a disadvantage, they fear nothing and compete courageously, bravely and confidently. In the end they got great honors. I am proud of them.” “TREC Evaluation Contest has not yet been in the sponsored contest list in our university, that is to say, no matter how great we did in the contest, we would not be rewarded, but on the contrary we have to pay the expenses ourselves.” he continued. “But why did we still join in the contest? Because the students think that this may be the only opportunity in their lives to perform on this world-class stage on behalf of HUST and China. In our preparations, some students suggested that we might detect fraud by using Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve in psychology. I was very surprised at their great imagination and creativity. At that moment I realized that nothing but the students’ creativity was the biggest reward to a teacher rather than places in a competition, extra points, material rewards and so forth.” He also said, “There must be many obstacles, difficulties or even crisis in the development of the university, but we should not be discouraged, for these students will be our bright future. I also believe that HUST will grow better and better.” He concluded at last, “As long as we are courageous, confident and brave enough to meet challenges, we will surely get great success no matter what counterparts we will compete with. Please keep in mind—the brave win.”