The artificial intelligence (AI) era is driven both by data and algorithms. The algorithm will become core competitiveness in the face of massive data. In 2018, Alimama will launch an advertising algorithm competition through a collaboration with the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI -18) on the Alibaba Tianchi platform. As Alibaba's big data marketing platform, Alimama, which has the core business data of Alibaba, hopes to uncover more technologies and talents through the competition and to empower the whole marketing ecology.

This competition will provide massive transaction data of sponsored searches on Taobao.com. Participants will utilize AI technologies to predict users' purchase intention. The conversion rate (CVR) is defined as the probability that an user finally purchases the advertised action, given information about users, advertised items, queries, contexts and shops. The CVR is formalized as CVR = P (conversion = 1 | query, user, ad, context, shop).

This competition focuses on two scenarios which are typical on Taobao.com.
1. CVR prediction on normal days with steady traffic.
2. CVR prediction on special days with huge traffic.

Award
1st Place $10,000
2nd Place $6,000
3rd Place $4,000
Special Award $8,000

• We will select 2 teams from the top 4-20 teams based on their submission materials (code + solution report + presentation slides) for th