What is a shared task? and what is the purpose of it? I noticed lately the increase of conducting shared tasks, what are they and what is the rationale behind them? why do we need them since we already have workshops and conferences?
The rationale is to get a bunch of smart people together to actually solve or at least make progress on open academic problems. I've never been to a "workshop" that actually did any work on the problem. Conferences are typically just people giving presentations and not really working on problems in my experience.