Enter Into Microsoft Speller Challenge & Win $10K

Microsoft have started a new competition between users knows as "Speller Challenge". In this competition people have to correct incorrect spelling of Bing Search Engine for better search results and the top five winners can win upto a prize of $10,000.

Bing feels that there is a lot of room for improvement in this area of their search engine as they are teaming up with Microsoft Research to offer a reward to the team that develops the best spelling alteration technique. They are calling it the Speller Challenge and goal is to "develop a spelling alteration system suitable for large-scale statistical data mining-based web search."

A common approach to spelling alteration is the noisy channel model, in which the received query (q) is treated as a noise-corrupted version of the target query (c). In this model, the spelling alteration system alters q into c and returns the latter's results. The techniques to best identify query/target pairs and best estimate these statistics are the active research problem that underlies this challenge. But that's just the foundation. Place the spelling alteration task in the context of web search, and you have another dimension to consider. The effectiveness of using a fixed lexicon is a known problem because it can lead the speller not only to miss "real word" errors but also misrecognize out-of-vocabulary tokens as errors.

If this challenge sounds like something up your alley Microsoft is offering a sample dataset for developers and researchers to use, a similar dataset will be used to test the effectiveness of the spelling alteration engine. There will be five winners with the first prize winner getting $10,000.

Click here to Enter into Challenge!

Enter Into Doodle for Google Contest & Win $15K

Now you can win upto $15,000 by entering in Doodle for Google Contest. Google have introduced its new Doodgle 4 Google contest for users in this year 2011. Google is running their 4th annual "Doodle 4 Google" contest for children in grades K-12.

The concept is simple, take your crayons and colored pencils and design a Google Logo that answers the question, "What I’d like to do someday..." Google will take all of the entries and partner with celebrity judges Whoopie Goldberg, skater Evan Lysacek, and "Garfield" creator Jim Davis to select the 40 best submissions. Those kids will then be flown to New York City and their work will be displayed at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Google is really doing a great job in the public relations arena. By donating money to schools and children through this program, they are helping to build brand recognition at a very young age. Brand loyalty is very important in today's cut-throat business world, and with a simple doodling contest they're helping ensure that millions of children not only know about Google's search engine, but have a positive impression of the company as a whole, all for a budget of under $2,000,000.

Click here to Enter in Contest.
The last date of Submissions Doodle 4 Google is March 16, 2011.