Dear Researcher, We (Neil Shah, Jerry Zitao Liu, Lei Li) are co-organizing WSDM Cup 2022 <https://www.wsdm-conference.org/2022/call-for-wsdm-cup-proposals/>, a machine learning competition-style event co-located with the leading WSDM conference (International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining). The conference has high-visibility, and is regularly attended by experts in the field. We are looking for competition tasks, and we are e-mailing you in hopes that you may have an task/idea to contribute; competition tasks regularly draw 100-200 teams of experts who dedicate their time to working on and achieving the best results on your task. This is an excellent opportunity to solicit expert feedback and brainpower towards solving your problems, identifying intern and FTE candidates, and building improved collaborations with your organization and academia. Typically, competition tasks are Kaggle-style, offering a clear specification of objective, a dataset (can be anonymized and de-identified appropriately), and a small reward for top-3 winning teams (typically ~$5K total, split across winners). Past tasks have come from amazing partners like Microsoft, Wikimedia, Adobe, ByteDance, Spotify, Baidu and more, on tasks as diverse as fake news classification, user retention prediction, music recommendation, vandalism detection, and knowledge-base completion, and winning teams have received excellent results across the board. You can find task specifications, and associated results below for inspiration: 2016 <https://www.wsdm-conference.org/2016/wsdm-cup.html>, 2017 <https://www.wsdm-cup-2017.org/>, 2018 <http://www.wsdm-conference.org/2018/call-for-participants.html>, 2019 <http://www.wsdm-conference.org/2019/wsdm-cup-2019.php>, 2020 <https://www.wsdm-conference.org/2020/wsdm-cup-2020.php>. Please let us know if you have a tentative idea in mind. We are happy to work with you on identifying and narrowing task specification. We expect competitions to run from mid-October to January, with the final results settled and the physical WSDM Cup event held around February 21-25, in conjunction with WSDM 2022, so there is time yet to ideate and put something together concretely. Cheers. --- Ugur Kursuncu, PhD Publicity Co-chair for ACM WSDM 2022 Postdoctoral Fellow AI Institute, University of South Carolina