The Alexa Prize
$2.5 Million to Advance Conversational Artificial Intelligence
September 2016 – November 2017Announcing the 2017 Alexa Prize Finalists
Amazon is excited to announce the finalists competing in the 2017 Alexa Prize. Congratulations to Alquist from the Czech Technical University in Prague, Sounding Board from the University of Washington, and What's up Bot from Heriot-Watt University!
The entire Amazon Alexa organization wants to thank all of the Alexa Prize teams for their creativity, passion and contributions to both AI science and delighting Alexa customers.
During the semifinals period, which started on July 1 and ended on August 15, 2017, Alexa customers interacted with the socialbots by saying “Alexa, let’s chat” to any Alexa powered device. Competing socialbots were anonymously invoked in response to this utterance. At the end of the interaction, customers were prompted to provide a rating from 1 to 5 stars (5 being the highest) on how they felt about speaking with that socialbot again. These customer ratings determined two of the teams moving on to the finals - Alquist from the Czech Technical University in Prague and Sounding Board from the University of Washington in Seattle. Amazon also selected a wildcard finalist - What's up Bot from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. To learn more about the detailed evaluation criteria, please go here.
Amazon Selects Teams to Compete for Inaugural $2.5 Million Alexa Prize
Amazon will sponsor 12 university teams to compete in the 2016-2017 Alexa Prize. This year’s inaugural competition focuses on the grand challenge of building a socialbot that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics for 20 minutes. The sponsored teams will receive a $100,000 stipend, Alexa-enabled devices, free Amazon Web Services (AWS) services to support their development efforts, and support from the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) team.
Amazon received over one hundred applications from leading universities across 22 countries.
All applications were reviewed and evaluated based on the following criteria: the potential scientific contribution to the field, the technical merit of the approach, the novelty of the idea, and the team’s ability to execute against their plan.
Congratulations!
Meet the 2016-2017 Sponsored Teams
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CMU Magnus
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, USA Faculty Advisor: Alan Black -
Ruby Star
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, USA Faculty Advisor: Alexander Rudnicky -
Alquist
Czech Technical University
Prague, CZ Faculty Advisor: Jan Šedivý
in Prague -
What’s Up Bot
Heriot-Watt University
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK Faculty Advisor: Oliver Lemon -
Pixie
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ, USA Faculty Advisor: Sanjeev Arora -
Wise Macaw
Rensselaer Polytechnic
Troy, NY, USA Faculty Advisor: Mei Si
Institute -
Eigen
University of California,
Berkeley, CA, USA Faculty Advisor: John DeNero
Berkeley -
SlugBot
University of California,
Santa Cruz, CA, USA Faculty Advisor: Marilyn Walker
Santa Cruz -
Edina
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK Faculty Advisor: Bonnie Webber -
MILA Team
University of Montreal
Montréal, Quebec, CA Faculty Advisor: Yoshua Bengio -
Roving Mind
University of Trento
Trento, IT Faculty Advisor: Giuseppe Riccardi -
Sounding Board
University of Washington
Seattle, WA, USA Faculty Advisor: Mari Ostendorf
Meet the 2016-2017 Unsponsored Teams
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DeisBot
Brandeis University
Waltham, MA, USA Faculty Advisor: Marie Meteer -
Wallace
Columbia University
New York, NY, USA Faculty Advisor: Ansaf Salleb-Aouissi -
Emerson
Emory University
Atlanta, GA, USA Faculty Advisor: Eugene Agichtein -
HarvardNLP
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA, USA Faculty Advisor: TBD -
Chatty Chat
Seoul National University
Seoul, South Korea Faculty Advisor: Kyomin Jung -
Krantikari
University of Bonn
Bonn, Germany Faculty Advisor: Jens Lehmann
The team with the highest-performing socialbot will win a $500,000 prize. Additionally, a prize of $1 million will be awarded to the winning team's university if their socialbot achieves the grand challenge of conversing coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics for 20 minutes.
Beginning in April 2017, as part of the research and judging process, millions of Alexa customers will have the opportunity to converse with the socialbots on popular topics. The feedback from Alexa users will be a factor in selecting the best socialbots to advance to the finals. Winners will be announced at a special session at re:Invent 2017, a global cloud computing conference hosted by Amazon Web Services.
Key Dates
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April 2017
First Alexa Customer Feedback Period Begins
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August 2017
Finalists Announced
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Final Alexa Customer Feedback Period Begins
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November 2017
Competition Concludes & Winners Announced
