Competition rules

1. Conditions of participation

The Environmental Toxicity Prediction Challenge is open to any person who accepts these rules. The competition is a part of the ICANN 2009 conference that will be held in Limassol, Cyprus on Sep 14-17, 2009. The competition will be concluded at the ICANN 2009 conference. Each individual can register only once for the competition and can submit only one set of predictions (the user can submit his/her results an infinitive number of times but only the last result, i.e. the one stored on September 1st, will be used for the evaluation). Several participants within the same organizations are allowed. There is no requirement for the contestants to participate in the ICANN conference.

2. Requirements

The participants should submit a clear short technical description of their methods that should be detailed enough to reproduce the results. The organizers and Advisory Board may request further and a more comprehensive description or may decline the participation of a contestant who refuses to provide it. This information is required to get a better understanding which approaches are more suitable for the environmental risk assessment.

3. Anonymity

The competitors can participate by using a pseudonym. All public communication will contain only pseudonyms of participants who may opt to remain anonymous. The names of the winners and description of methods will be revealed at the ICANN’09 conference and published at the web site of the challenge. The names of other participants will be revealed only with their agreement.

4. Disputes

While all possible cares will be taken to prevent it, the organizers will not be responsible for any error in evaluation of results due to any (technical) problems (e.g., incorrect order of predictions, incorrect format of submitted results, incomplete results, etc.). All decisions taken by the Organizers and the Advisory Board are final ones and will not be subjected to any modification or disputes.

5. Publications

A special issue of a journal composed of top submissions is planned.

Organization Committee

Dr. Igor V. Tetko, Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen, Germany
Prof. Terry W. Schultz, University of Tennessee, USA
Prof. Wlodzislaw Duch, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun, Poland

Advisory Board

Prof. Emilio Benfenati, Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche "Mario Negri", Milano, Italy
Prof. Mark T.D. Cronin, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
David J. Dix, EPA, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, NC, USA
Prof. Paola Gramatica, University of Insubria, Italy
Dr. Barry Hardy, Douglas Connect, Switzerland
Prof. Douglas Hawkins, University of Minnesota, MN, USA
Dr. Joanna Jaworska, P&G, Belgium
Prof. Jarek Meller, University of Cincinnati Medical College, OH, USA
Prof. Tomas Öberg, University of Kalmar, Sweden
Prof. Willie Peijnenburg, Institute Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezondheid en Milieu, RIVM, The Netherlands
Prof. Gerrit Schüürmann, Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Germany
Dr. Weida Tong, FDA, Food and Drug Administration, Center for Toxicoinformatics, AR, USA
Prof. Alex Tropsha, University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill, NC, USA
Dr. José-Manuel Zaldívar Comenges, European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy