The 2012 i2b2 challenge is on temporal relations. The data for this task is provided by Partners HealthCare and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (MIMIC II Database). All records have been fully de-identified and manually annotated for temporal relations.

The challenge registration starts on April 14, 2012. Training data for the challenge will be released starting June 1, 2012. Test data are scheduled to be released in August 2012. The results of the challenge will be presented at the workshop organized by i2b2 at AMIA.

Data for the task will be released under a Data Use Agreement and are to be used for research only. Obtaining the data requires completing a registration and signing the Data Use Agreement.

Evaluation Dates, File Formats, and Evaluation Metrics.

The evaluation will be conducted using withheld test data. Participating teams are asked to stop development as soon as they download the test data. Each team is allowed to upload (through this website) up to three system runs for each of the tiers of the challenge. System output is expected in the form of standoff annotations, following the exact format of the ground truth annotations to be provided by the organizers.

Participants are asked to submit a short paper describing their system and analyzing their performance. Papers should be in AMIA style and should not exceed five pages. Authors of top performing systems and of particularly novel approaches will be invited to present or demo their systems at the workshop.

Tentative Schedule

April 14, 2012	Registration Opens
June 1, 2012	Training Data Release
August 1, 2012	Test Data Release
August 3, 2012	System Outputs on Test Data Due at 11:59pm Eastern Time
September 1, 2012	Short Papers Due
September 21, 2012	Invitations to Present at the Workshop
November, 2012	Workshop

Organizing Committee:

Ozlem Uzuner, co-chair,	SUNY at Albany
Anna Rumshisky, co-chair,	MIT
Peter Szolovits,	MIT
Lynette Hirschman,	MITRE
Cheryl Clark,	MITRE
John Aberdeen,	MITRE
Martha Palmer,	University of Colorado Boulder
Guergana Savova,	Children's Hospital Boston
James Pustejovsky,	Brandeis University

Please see the FAQs and announcements for more information. Questions on the challenge can be addressed to Ozlem Uzuner, i2b2nlp@albany.edu.