It's Day One for the Alexa Prize
On June 5, 2019 Amazon announced the teams selected to compete for the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 3, a multimillion-dollar university challenge to advance human-computer interaction. These teams will create socialbots that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans on a range of current events and popular topics such as entertainment, sports, politics, technology, and fashion. Each university team participating will receive a $250,000 research grant, Alexa-enabled devices, Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support their development efforts, access to the Extended Topical Chat dataset, and other resources and Alexa team support.
Amazon received applications from leading universities from more than 15 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. The field this year was extremely competitive making the selection process even more challenging than in previous years. Read Dilek Hakkani-Tur’s blog post on the team announcement.
The teams will begin their journey with a boot camp hosted by the Alexa Prize in Seattle in early August with the official start of the challenge in September. This class of socialbots is expected to be released to Alexa customers in December 2019. A $500,000 prize will be awarded to the team that creates the best socialbot. The second- and third-place teams will receive prizes of $100,000 and $50,000, respectively. The grand challenge, a $1 million research grant, will be awarded to the winning team’s university if they have a composite score of 4.0 or higher and at least two-thirds of their Socialbot’s conversations with interactors last for twenty (20) minutes.
Learn more about the results of the 2017 and 2018 Alexa Prize.
Congratulations
Meet the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 3 Teams
Carnegie Mellon University
Faculty Advisor:
Alex Rudnicky
Czech Technical University in Prague
Faculty Advisor:
Jan Sedivy
Emory University
Faculty Advisor:
Jinho Choi
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
Faculty Advisor:
Mikhail Burtsev
Stanford University
Faculty Advisor:
Christopher Manning
University of California, Davis
Faculty Advisor:
Zhou Yu
University of California, Irvine
Faculty Advisor:
Sameer Singh
University of California, San Diego
Faculty Advisor:
Julian McAuley
University of California, Santa Cruz
Faculty Advisor:
Marilyn Walker
