Getting started with the Runway Functions challenge

Hello all―this is a quick overview of how to take on this challenge! Remember, you must submit your final solution by April 25, 2022 to be eligible for the $40,000 prize pool.

As a reminder, this is a university challenge! Cash prizes are restricted to Official Representatives (individual participants or team leads, in the case of a group project) who at the time of entry are:
age 18 or older, a U.S. citizen or permanent resident of the United States or its territories, and
affiliated with an accredited U.S. university either as an enrolled student or faculty member

There are a few steps to take to qualify for prizes. For convenience, here is everything in one place:

  1. Sign up for the Open Arena by clicking the “Sign up/Compete”.
  2. Start developing your model in the Open Arena. See the problem description for the specs to get started, and check out the benchmark blog post for a super helpful walkthrough of a starting approach. You can download the data, submit your predictions, and see how well your model performs on the Open Leaderboard.
  3. Submit your pre-screening eligibility information to the Prescreened submission upload using the provided Eligibility Prescreening Template. All participants must be approved in order to access the Prescreened Arena, where you can test out your prediction code and make your final submission for prizes. Remember, you should allow up to a week for your eligibility information to be reviewed, so the earlier you submit the better!
  4. Test your code in the Prescreened Arena. Once you enter this arena, you can update your model using additional training labels provided (this includes labels for periods that were held out for validation in the Open Arena; might as well include them so your final model has more data to learn from!). Then package up your prediction code according to the Code Submission Format. You’ll find more detailed instructions in the code execution runtime repository, including a worked example that creates a submission from the the benchmark solution. When you’re ready, submit to the Prescreened Arena, and view your test results on the Prescreened Arena Leaderboard.
  5. Make your final submission to the Prescreened Arena. We will take your final Prescreened submission and use it to evaluate your solution on the Final Evaluation dataset (collected after submissions close). This is the score that will determine final prize rankings! Once again, it’s best to start preparing your submission early, since it can take time to add packages to the runtime and debug your submission.

We’re looking forward to seeing what you build! You should have a lot of great resources to get you going. Feel free to reply here with any questions that we can help address. Good luck!