In addition to the prizes given to the top-3 scoring teams in the private leaderboard, a **Judges' Award** prize will also be given which is not necessarily based on the leaderboard scores. The goal of the Judges' Award is to encourage contestants to use novel and problem-specific approaches which leverage knowledge of the audio domain. Another key factor is computational efficiency: we want to promote models that can fit within reasonable resource constraints, as opposed to very large models that may merely memorize a dataset and may not fit within typical deployment environments on mobile devices, for example.

For the Judges' Award, submissions will be evaluated according to:

* Innovation and novelty
* Consideration of domain-specific properties of audio
* Consideration of issues specific to the FSDKaggle2019 dataset, including how to leverage the clean set and noisy set, potential domain mismatch, variable length of audio clips, etc.
* Computational efficiency
* Classification performance

**The following strict rules apply for being eligible for the Judges’ Award:**

1. Submit your system to DCASE Challenge (choose submission mode 2 or 3)
2. Usage of **both curated train set and noisy train set is mandatory**, and novel ways of using the noisy train set will be especially valued
3. **Single model approaches** are strongly preferred over ensembles. Occasionally, we could consider **small** ensembles of **different** models, if the approach is innovative.
4. The Judges’ Award Winner will be asked to **publish the code as open-source**
5. Please report on the computational efficiency of your model by at least including **the number of model parameters**. Additional measures or information to satisfy the motivation of computational efficiency will be welcome.
6. Please specify in the technical report the submission file (ie, *filename.csv*) corresponding to the candidate model to be considered for the Judges' Award.

Please check the [Submission Modes](https://www.kaggle.com/c/freesound-audio-tagging-2019/overview/submission-modes) page for instructions about how to get your submission considered for the Judges' Award. Note that the Judges' Award is a submission **additional to the 2 scored private submissions** eligible for the final private leaderboard. The Judges' Award winner will be announced after the competition ends and the organizers have reviewed all candidate submissions in this [discussion thread](https://www.kaggle.com/c/freesound-audio-tagging-2019/discussion/88060). You can place your questions and comments about the Judges' Award in this same forum thread.