This year's Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference (AIIDE 2010) will host a StarCraft AI competition that looks to help academic researchers "evaluate their AI systems in a robust commercial RTS environment." Projects can use a variety of programming languages in concert with the Broodwar API: Java, Python, LUA, and C#.

Though the conference will likely take place around mid-to-late October 2010, the competition actually begins on October 1st (registrations accepted all the way up until mid-September) and final matches with commentary will be held at AIIDE 2010. The competition will also feature exhibition matches between skilled human players and top performing bots.

You can find more information on the StarCraft AI competition at Expressive Intelligence Studio's site. I've also included a video below of organizer Ben Weber discussing the event's motivation and the technology enabling it:

[Via Game/AI]