Artificial Intelligence

12 University Teams Advance in Amazon AI Contest

• By Sri Ravipati
• 11/16/16

Earlier this week, Amazon revealed the 12 teams that will participate in this year’s Alexa Prize contest. The inaugural higher ed competition, launched in September, challenges university and college students worldwide to develop a “socialbot” capable of holding conversations with humans for 20 minutes on popular topics and news events.

Chosen from an applicant pool of more than 100 teams from schools across 22 countries, the participating teams are:

• University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA): Machine Learning @ Berkeley;
• University of California, Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA): SlugBots;
• Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA): CMU Magnus and an additional team (name TBD);
• Princeton University (Princeton, NJ): Princeton Alexa;
• University of Washington (Seattle, WA): HuskyBot;
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY): BAKAbot;
• Czech Technical University in Prague (Prague, Czech Republic): eClub;
• Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh, Scotland): WattSocialBot;
• University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, Scotland): Edina;
• University of Montreal (Montreal, Quebec, Canada): MILA Team; and
• University of Trento (Trento, Italy): Roving Minds.

Each team will receive a $100,000 stipend, as well as Alexa-enabled devices, Amazon Web Services cloud computing services and support from the Amazon Alexa Skills Kit team. The team that develops the highest-performing socialbot will receive a $500,000 grand prize. An additional $1 million will be awarded if the socialbot can successfully hold a 20 minute conversation with a human.

Further information about the competition is available on the Alexa Prize site.