IT'S DAY ONE FOR THE ALEXA PRIZE
On November 3, 2020, Amazon announced the teams selected to compete for the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4, a multimillion-dollar university challenge to advance human-computer interaction.
| Team | University | Faculty Advisor |
|---|---|---|
| Returning | ||
| Alquist | Czech Technical University in Prague | Jan Šedivý |
| Athena | University of California, Santa Cruz | Marilyn Walker |
| Chirpy Cardinal | Stanford University | Christopher Manning |
| DREAM | Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology | Mikhail Burtsev |
| Emora | Emory University | Jinho Choi |
| New | ||
| CASPR | The University of Texas at Dallas | Gopal Gupta |
| Genuine2 | Universidad Politécnica de Madrid | Luis Fernando D’Haro |
| PROTO | SUNY at Buffalo, New York | Rohini Srihari |
| Viola | University of Southern California | Jonathan May |
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.
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 teams will begin their journey on November 9, 2020 and this class of socialbots is expected to be released to Alexa customers in early 2021. 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.
Explore the past challenges page to learn more about the results of previous rounds of the Alexa Prize.