Why Your Online Impersonation of a 16-year Old Girl Won't Last Long

An anonymous reader writes "Can computers pick up your age and gender from your tweets? If you want to give it a try, here's your chance: 'To develop your software for age and gender identification, we provide you with a training data set that consists of blog posts, Twitter tweets, social media texts, as well as hotel reviews.' Well, at least my paid Amazon reviews are safe for the time being..."

This is a software contest

[mbone]

For those puzzled by the description here, this is a software contest, with a 300 Euro prize :

An award of 300 euros for the best performing approach to author profiling (age and gender identification) is sponsored by Atribus (Corex).

Re:Wow, what a great racket

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't give source code.
and the note : By submitting your software you retain full copyrights. You agree to grant us usage rights only for the purpose of the PAN competition. We agree not to share your software with a third party or use it for other purposes than the PAN competition.

Now that doesn't mean they won't use it. But it is easy to get it to call home if the date on the machine is 6 months later, or start some other more subtle problems. reverse the sexes, give data directly from the randomiser. Whatever you feel like.

If they are using it for anything else, you can have them.