Kakao Hosts the 3rd 'Kakao Arena' AI Competition

Prediction and Recommendation of Playlists for 'Melon'

[Asia Economy Reporter Jin-gyu Lee] Kakao announced on the 21st that it will hold the 3rd 'Kakao Arena,' an artificial intelligence (AI) competition.

Since 2018, Kakao Arena has been held annually as a problem-solving competition platform using AI technology, specifically machine learning, and this year marks its third edition. To provide more applicants with the opportunity to participate, the competition period has been significantly extended and will run for about 90 days from the 27th of this month to July 26th.

The theme is playlist prediction and recommendation for Melon, Korea's leading music platform. As music consumption patterns change to a structure where users create 'their own playlists' and consume 'music they like,' playlists have emerged as a very important factor in the music listening environment.

In line with this trend, Kakao Arena will release 'partial data' such as song titles, song information, features extracted from audio, and tags of specific Melon playlists, then present a task to predict and recommend the remaining hidden songs and some or all of the hidden tags.

For example, after showing the titles and tags of 5 out of 10 songs in a specific playlist, participants will create a model that can predict the hidden tags of the remaining 5 songs in the playlist. Kakao plans to apply the results of this competition to its services to analyze and recommend music more precisely tailored to user preferences.

Anyone interested in AI technology and problem-solving can participate individually or as a team through the Kakao Arena website. The total prize money for the competition is 14.08 million KRW, with 5.12 million KRW awarded to the first-place team (1 team), 2.56 million KRW each to the second-place teams (2 teams), and 1.28 million KRW each to the third-place teams (3 teams). Outstanding evaluators among the winners will be given preferential treatment when applying for positions in Kakao's recommendation team in the future.

A Kakao representative stated, "Based on the results of this competition, we plan to further advance technology that analyzes music usage behavior and curates music tailored to individual tastes."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.