Subject: CoIL Competition

Is your water safe?

There is increased concern at the impact man is having on the 
environment. In temperate climates, summer algae growth can result in 
poor water clarity, mass deaths of river fish and the closure of 
recreational water facilities. To understand this problem, there is a 
need to identify the crucial chemical control variables for the 
biological processes. This is the subject of the first Computational 
Intelligence and Learning (CoIL) competition.

CoIL is an EC-funded Cluster of Networks of Excellence (NoEs), formed 
in Jan 1999 as a collaboration between ERUDIT, EvoNet, MLNET and 
NEuroNet, representing Fuzzy Logic, Evolutionary Computing, Machine 
Learning, and Neural Computing respectively. While the techniques and 
paradigms of interest to these networks are largely distinct (and 
sometimes complementary), these various techniques can often be used to 
tackle similar problems or be used together on the same problem.

This CoIL competition has been organised through ERUDIT, and is open to 
all interested parties. ERUDIT has had very successful competitions 
itself in 1996 and 1998, and the results of these illustrated how a 
variety of different techniques can be used to tackle any problem.

Water quality samples were taken from sites on different European 
rivers of a period of approximately one year.  These samples were 
analysed for various chemical substances, and algae samples were 
collected to determine the algae population distributions. While the 
chemical analysis is cheap and easily automated, the biological part 
involves microscopic examination, requires trained manpower and is 
therefore both expensive and slow. 

The task of the CoIL competition is to predict the algae frequency 
distributions on the basis of  the measured concentrations of the 
chemical substances and some global information about the season when 
the sample was taken, the river size and the fluid velocity. The data 
is a mixture of qualitative and numeric variables, and some of the data 
is incomplete.

The detailed problem description and the data is available from 
http://www.erudit.de/erudit/committe/fc-ttc/ic-99/index.htm or by ftp from:
FTP Server: ftp.mitgmbh.de
Username:   anonymous
Password:   <your email address>
Filename:   /pub/problem.zip

In case of difficulty obtaining the data, contact:
ERUDIT Service Center, c/o ELITE Foundation, Promenade 9, 52076 Aachen, 
Germany. Phone: +49 2408 6969, Fax +49240894582, email: sh@mitgmbh.de

A board of referees will declare a winner and a runner-up. The winners 
will be invited, free of charge, to attend the EUFIT’99 conference to 
present their solutions during a special session on September 14, 1999 
in Aachen, Germany.

Important dates:
Apr 15, 1999: Data available
May 31, 1999: Deadline for submission of solutions
Jul 31, 1999: Announcement of results
Sep 14, 1999: Award of winners at the EUFIT '99 conference in Aachen
Sep 14, 1999: Presentation of the best solutions 

For general CoIL information, see http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/coil/