Dear ENCODE-DREAM Challenge Participants,   We are now 1 week away from final submission for Conference Round. Final submission will be due by Midnight Pacific Time (GMT -7:00) September 30, 2016. You are allowed multiple submissions, but we will score your most recent submission. There are several other important announcements relevant to the challenge listed below.   1) We will close both the final submission queue for the Conference Round and the submission queue for the Leaderboard Round on September 30, 2016, midnight Pacific Time.   2) The top two teams from the Conference Round will be invited to speak at the DREAM Conference. The DREAM organizers will supply travel support up to $1500 USD for both of the top two teams. This money can be used for travel, registration, hotel. The top two teams will also be asked to supply an abstract for their 20 minute presentation at the conference. Conference details can be found at https://www.iscb.org/recomb-regsysgen2016. The criteria to be invited to the conference, besides being one of the top two teams includes: 2a) Teams will be asked to work with the organizers to validate their methodology, that is, does your code reproduce the submitted results. Your code will only be used for validation purposes and NOT made public at this point in the challenge. 2b) Teams will be required to supply a method write-up. This write-up should cover the general aspects of the methodology and not be a detailed description.   3) A teams' submission to the Conference Round will be honored in terms of the criteria for authorship for the overview Challenge paper. Teams will be required to supply code and a method write-up, but these can be kept private until the final round completes on January 7. See the following for details on the Challenge incentives: https://www.synapse.org/#!Synapse:syn6131484/wiki/402037   4) We will be extending the overall Challenge until January 7. The organizers will shut down all submission queues between October 1-14. This period will be used to evaluate the top performers from the Conference Round and to update any data or scoring issues that arose throughout the challenge. For the second phase of the challenge, we will open the Leaderboard queue and the Final Submission queue on October 14 and both queues will be open until January 7, 2017. Teams will be allowed 10 Leaderboard submissions and 1 Final Round Submission. Note that this is a new phase of the challenge and all team submission counts will be set to 0. Details of the updated timeline can be viewed here: https://www.synapse.org/#!Synapse:syn6131484/wiki/402035   Thanks to everyone who is participating in the Challenge. We encourage everyone to join us at the RSG with DREAM Challenge Conference on November 6-9. If you have additional questions, please post them here.   Kind Regards, ENCODE-DREAM Challenge Organizers.