SURFsara and Common Crawl wish to give everybody the possibility to analyze open web data. Because of this we are hosting the second edition of the Norvig Web Data Science Award, a challenge to all researchers and students in the Benelux. We provide free access to the SURFsara Hadoop cluster with a copy of the full Common Crawl web crawl from March 2014 - almost 3 billion web pages.

Participants are completely free in choosing their research question. For example, last year there were submissions looking at concept association, connections between languages, readability and more. Be creative and think outside of the box!

The award is named after Peter Norvig, well-known computer scientist and currently Director of Research at Google. He is the head of the jury that will select the winning submission.

The contest will run from May 1 till July 31, 2014. The winning team will be announced at the award ceremony in September 2014 and will get a tablet, smart watch and Github small plan for a year.

By popular demand we will also give access to small number of non-academic teams. They won't be eligible for the prizes, but can get experience with Big Data analysis, and perhaps an honorable mention.

To sign up for the challenge and to get additional information you can visit the website at norvigaward.github.io.