Challenges in representation learning: A report on three machine learning contests

The ICML 2013 Workshop on Challenges in Representation Learning1 focused on three challenges: the black box learning challenge, the facial expression recognition challenge, and the multimodal learning challenge. We describe the datasets created for these challenges and summarize the results of the competitions. We provide suggestions for organizers of future challenges and some comments on what kind of knowledge can be gained from machine learning competitions.