Bin Tan ----------------------------------------------------------------------- WWW Challenger: Infer user preference over websites Users: Search engine users Data: Search results Description: People have preferred websites for different searches. For example, if I am searching for a paper download then I would probably only look for CiteSeer and ACM because they usually have a paper download link. When searching for news, I trust NY Times over other news sources. It would be convenient to give more weight to results from these sites. The preference can be inferred from implicit or explicit feedback, but the challenge is the preferred websites change for different search topics. Email Challenger: Assign estimated importance to emails Users: Email users Data: Incoming Emails Description: Some people like secretaries or people working for the government receive a lot of emails daily and it would help them if the incoming emails are assigned importance values so that important emails can be dealt with earlier. One could judge the importance based on multiple issues like sender, subject, data or deeper analysis of email content. For example, if the emails contain the following ^ÓCould you inform Mr. Somebody I will not be able to come to the meeting this afternoon^Ô, then it is obvious that the email must be somehow processed before afternoon and is likely to be important. This is somehow related to the paper ^ÓIntegration of Email and Task Lists^Ô http://www.ceas.cc/papers-2004/134.pdf Literature Challenge: Help Windows programmers find solutions to a technical problem. Users: Windows programmers Data: MSDN library and knowledge base, and maybe external sources like articles in codeproject.com Description: Develop a system to quickly help programmers find Win32 APIs or sample code that can help them solve a particular technical problem. If the terms used by the programmer to describe the problem are different from those used in the documentation, or if the solution is not explicitly stated in the documentation and scattered in other documentation, then it may be difficult to find the solution. For example, if one wants to find out how to convert from DOS 8.3 filename to Windows long filename, the search result for ^Óconvert file name 8.3 long^Ô in MSDN would return GetFullPathName, and one has to read carefully its documentation to discover the actual API that does the desired job is GetLongPathName. It happens so because ^Ó8.3^Ô is never mentioned in the documentation of GetLongPathName and only in the documentation of GetFullPathName as a side note. It would be nice if the system could collect all these information together to provide the programmer a direct answer. This may be a challenge because it may need sophisticated NLP analysis like those used in question answering.