Checkout our latest Blitz ⚡  |  Welcome to AI Blitz XI! 🚀 

Community Contribution Prizes 📓  |  Find Teammates 👯‍♀️

Easy-2-Follow Notebooks 💻   | Discord AI Community 

🕵️ Introduction

Fast and Furious: Self-Driving Cars Edition 🚗

Self-driving cars are here! They are no longer folklore of sci-fi books but an element of the present time. The development of self-driving cars is one of the most exciting AI developments of recent years.
By solving the 5 puzzles in Blitz XI, you will get a better understanding of how these futuristic vehicles work through real-life scenarios! With the help of our starter kits and notebooks, you can learn and excel at object detection in only three weeks. Compete by yourself or in a team and stand a chance to win from the $400 USD cash prize pool. 
 

Some background about autonomous vehicles

In the last few months, we witness some unique ventures, like Waymo One, that allows customers to hail self-driving taxis. Alibaba’s AutoX also introduced a fleet of fully automated cars without accompanying drivers. Automotive AI is replacing human drivers by using self-driving cars that use data gathered by sensors.

Self-driving cars are here to make our life convenient and safe. It is anticipated that self-driving cars will reduce car crashes as it removes human error. They will improve traffic efficiency and reduce emissions, making them an environmentally friendly option. 

How is Machine Learning used to make self-driving cars work?! 

For cars to work without a driver, they need to automatically identify objects, understand the situation on the road and surrounding environment. They use this data to make decisions using object detection and object classification algorithms. These cars have several sensors that detect objects, classify them and interpret this information to make decisions. This includes understanding road signs, identifying lanes, processing the surrounding environment and other vehicles around them.
 

How does Blitz XI give you real-world challenges and scenarios? 

Blitz XI includes 5 computer vision puzzles tackling various challenges associated with making an autonomous car work.

1. Obstacle Prediction you will be tasked with predicting moving objects with the help of radar data. Click here for the starter kit to help you with the basics of binary classification.

2. Lidar Car Detection given 3D LiDAR data points, predict how many cars are around your vehicle. Access the starter kit over here.

3. Environment Classification your task is to classify the weather conditions of the input images. Check out the starter kit to know the first steps.

4. Object Detection With radar data from your car, can you detect different vehicles around you? This starter kit will help beginners with object detection.

5. Scene Segmentation is to help self-driving cars to make better decisions by separating various elements like lanes, people, roads and buildings from one another. For this puzzle, your task is to segment the scene of the input image. The starter kit gives a walkthrough of image segmentation and its basics.

📅 TIMELINE 

• Start Time: 31st August 2021 | 11:30 AM UTC
• End Time: 21st September 2021 | 11:30 AM UTC
• Duration: 21 days/3 weeks

💻 INSTRUCTIONS

• Each problem has an associated weight. This weight denotes the problem’s contribution to your final score.
• The final leaderboard is calculated by the weighted mean of your rank across all the problems in the contest. If a problem is not attempted by the participant, his/her rank in that problem is denoted by the total number of participants in the whole challenge.
• To help you "Get Started" we have a starter kit available for each of these problems. We hope they are helpful; if you find any bugs, typos, or improvements, please send us a pull request.
• In case you have any queries, please reach out to us via the Discussion Forums.

🏆 Prizes

• Leaderboard 1st Place: $100 
• Leaderboard 2nd Place: $100
• Community Contribution:  2 x $100

🧾 ELIGIBILITY

AI BlitzXI⚡ is open to everyone who is interested in diving into the world of Data sciences - students, professionals or researchers. With problems of varying difficulty, we try to ensure that there is something for everyone. For eligibility on prizes please read the rules of the challenge.

Problem Setter: Shubhamai, Dipam Chakraborty, Ayush Shivani

Team: Shubhamai, Vrushank Vyas, Sneha Nanavati, Ayush Shivani, Shivam Khandelwal, Sharada Mohanty

Contributors:  Rabiul Islam

Interested in helping us out or want to put your own puzzle in the next iteration of this competition? Please send an email to ashivani@aicrowd.com.

Interested in sponsoring AI Blitz in the next iteration of this competition? Please send an email to mohanty@aicrowd.com.

📱 Contact

If you have any questions, consider posting on the Blitz 11 Community Discussion board, or join the party on our Discord!