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View additional information at NIH Challenges.
Overview
Timeline
- Start: 9/15/2026 4:00 AM ETEnd: 1/2/2027 4:59 AM ET
- 1/15/2027 5:00 AM ET
- 2/1/2027 4:59 AM ET
- 03/29/27
- 03/30/27
Prize
Prizes awarded under this Challenge will be paid by electronic funds transfer and may be subject to federal income taxes. HHS/NIH will comply with Internal Revenue Service withholding and reporting requirements, where applicable. Entities participating in this Challenge are encouraged, but not required, to obtain a free Unique Entity ID (UEI) via SAM.gov, as this will expedite prize payment. Additional information is available at sam.gov/content/entity-registration.
NIH/NLM reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to (a) cancel, suspend, or modify the Challenge, or any part of it, for any reason, and/or (b) not award any prizes if no submissions are deemed worthy.
NIH/NLM also reserves the right to validate submissions based on the Docker Images, repositories, and/or documentation provided by participants. Evidence of gaming the system will result in disqualification.
Use of Prize Funds
Participants are reminded that under this challenge announcement, NIH/NLM is awarding unrestricted cash prizes, not grants. The purpose of this Challenge is to reward innovation, not provide financial assistance, and NIH/NLM does not limit how winners may use cash prizes awarded to them.
For each individual task, a total pool of $125,000 will be split among the top two performing participants (whether an individual, team, or entity) using fixed percentage proportions:
Task 1
First Place (Winner): 80%--$100,000
Second Place: 20%----$25,000
Rules
Terms & Conditions
Participants are solely responsible for ensuring their submissions and activities comply with all applicable laws, regulations, and policies. NIH cannot provide legal advice to third parties. Participants should consult their own legal counsel as necessary and appropriate.
Judging Criteria
Challenge participants will build systems that process a challenge-specific corpus of documents selected from PubMed/PMC® a ranked list of candidate documents that satisfy the information need expressed in natural language. Note, only one these ranked items can be (potentially) correct.
To determine the winners for this track, participants will be evaluated on a challenge-specific evaluation dataset comprising approximately 1,000 distinct information needs expressed in natural language. Participants will apply their systems to the evaluation set and submit their predicted document(s) for each question. A subset of the evaluation questions will be used for formal evaluation, with participant responses compared against an expert-verified gold-standard reference set. The primary evaluation metric will be MRR, MRR measures how highly the system ranks the relevant item for each question and rewards systems that place that relevant item near the top of their ranked results.
•MRR: Measures how highly a system ranks the relevant item for each question, rewarding systems that place the relevant item near the top of their ranked results.
•Ease of Use: Assesses the effort required to deploy, configure, operate, and use the system in the standardized NIH cloud environment.
•Compute Time: Measures the computational time required to generate responses.
•Compute Effort: Measures the computational effort required to generate responses, including the resources and processing required by the system.
•Memory Footprint: Measures the memory and other computational resources required to operate the system and generate responses.
MRR will serve as the primary metric for determining final system rankings and identifying the overall winning systems. In the event of a tie in MRR, the additional evaluation criteria listed above may be used to differentiate systems and determine the final ranking.
MRR will serve as the primary metric for determining final system rankings and identifying the overall winning systems. In the event of a tie in MRR, the additional evaluation criteria listed above may be used to differentiate systems and determine the final ranking.