Contests: way forward or detour?

Contests and challenges have energized researchers and focused attention in many fields recently, including recommender systems. At the 2008 RecSys conference, winners were announced for a contest proposing new startup companies. The 2009 conference featured a panel reflecting on the then recently completed Netflix challenge. Would additional contests help move the field of recommender systems forward? Or would they just draw attention from the most important problems to problems that are most easily formulated as contests? If contests would be useful, what should the tasks be and how should performance be evaluated? The panel will begin with short presentations by the panelists. Following that, the panelists will respond to brief sketches of possible new contests. In addition to prediction and ranking tasks, tasks might include making creative use of the outputs of a fixed recommender engine, or eliciting inputs for a recommender engine.