GDC 2014 - The 21st Annual Graph Drawing Contest

Graph Drawing contests are annually held in conjunction with the Symposium of Graph Drawing since 1994. I think the original idea came from Peter Eades and Joe Marks, who were also the first contest organizers. The winners of the first contest received a book as award. Later, cash prices were established. In 2008, gold medals and trophies were awarded to the winners. The results of the contest were furthermore published in the proceedings of the Graph Drawing Symposium, with Springer LNCS.
Categories
Over the years, we had a variety of contest categories:
Contest graphs (1994 to 2006, 2008 to 2013)
Free-style drawings (1998 to 2001, 2004 to 2007)
Video/interactive exploration (1997)
Incremental graph drawing (1998)
Spontaneous mobiles (2000)
Interactive graph analysis (2002)
Evolving Graphs (2005)
FIFA World Cup History (2006)
Social Network Tools/Innovations (2007)
Partial Graph Layout (2009)
Edge Routing (2010)
Angular Resolution (2011)
Restricted Area (2012)
Review Networks (2013)
Creative (2013)
On-site challenge (2004 to 2011, 2013)
Game contest (2012)
Statistics
Graph Drawing, even though very important, is a subject for very few specialists in the field. Since the contest challenges the state of the art, it is no wonder that the number of submissions is usually not too large. Here is some statistics of the participation in the contest.
1994: 4 contest graphs, only winners reported
1995: 3 contest graphs, 40 submissions
1996: 4 contest graphs, 35 graphs submitted
1997: 3 contest graphs, 13 submissions
1998: 4 contest graphs, 17 submissions
1999: 4 contest graphs, 18 submissions
2000: 4 contest graphs, 8 submissions
2001: 4 contest graphs, 14 submissions
2002: 2 contest graphs, 4 submissions
2003: 2 contest graphs, 7 submissions
2004: challenge + freestyle, 21 submissions
2005: challenge + freestyle + evolving, 17 submissions
2006: challenge + 4 categories, 20 submissions
2007: challenge + free + socialNet, 10 submissions
2008: challenge + 4 categories, 18 submissions
2009: challenge + 4 categories, 27 submissions
2010: challenge + 3 categories, 25 submissions
2011: challenge + 3 categories, 30 submissions
2012: game contest + 3 categories, 21 submissions
2013: challenge + 3 categories, 12 submissions