The 8th ISSMGE TC304/TC309 Student Contest was held at the 2nd Workshop on Future of Machine Learning in Geotechnics (2FOMLIG), Chengdu, China, October 11-13, 2024, with a particular focus on landslide detection using machine learning techniques. The Organizing Committee consists of Prof. Iason Papaioannou (Chair), Prof. Jinhui Li, Dr. Ronald Schneider (Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM), Germany), and Prof. Te Xiao.
The contest question (https://www.fomlig2024.com/En/Menu/a6ac32f9-02cb-421b-8bd6-242627ce7bf8) was released on June 1, 2024, which included two tasks:
(1) Develop machine learning models to identify landslide instances from satellite images;
(2) Propose probabilistic methods to quantify the uncertainty in the detected landslide areas or boundaries.
A total of 16 teams registered for the contest, out of which 10 teams submitted their results by September 16, 2024. After a preliminary evaluation, the Organizing Committee invited 7 teams (1 from France-Austria-China, 1 from South Korea, and 5 from China) to present their work at the 2FOMLIG conference. Prof. Limin Zhang was invited to join the committee for the on-site evaluation of the presentations. The best teams were selected according to:
(1) The completeness of the two tasks;
(2) The performance of the landslide detection model;
(3) The method used for uncertainty quantification; and
(4) The quality of the abstract writing and presentation.
Each team was given 8 minutes for presentation and 7 minutes for Q&A. More than 40 people attended the contest session. The final list of winners is as follows:
- Student Contest Award (1st place): Team (INSA Lyon-University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences-Hefei University of Technology-Hohai University)
- Encouragement Award (2nd place): Team (Chengdu University of Technology), Team (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Team (Wuhan University-University of Electronic Science and Technology of China)
- Honorable Mention Award (3rd place): Team (Nanchang University), Team (Guangdong University of Technology), Team (Kookmin University)
The awards were presented by Prof. Iason Papaioannou, Prof. Limin Zhang, Prof. Jianye Ching, and Prof. Kok-Kwang Phoon at the conference banquet in the evening of October 12, 2024.
