MIPT team is selected for Amazon Alexa multimillion-dollar university challenge
On Nov. 3, Amazon published the selection results for the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4. The committee has selected nine finalists, including a team from the MIPT Neural Networks and Deep Learning Lab.
Denis Kuznetsov, Dmitry Evseev, Anton Peganov, Alsu Sagirova, Dmitry Karpov, and Dilyara Baimurzina, the captain, — our DREAM team. They are participating for the second year in a row under the guidance of Mikhail Burtsev. Team consists of MIPT PhD students and those involved in the DeepPavlov project at the Neural Networks and Deep Learning Lab.
“We have a lot of work to do this tear,” says Dilyara, DREAM’s leader. “We have been preparing the engineering infrastructure for the past year, as well as the interaction with Amazon services. We’ve learned how to test the bot and, most importantly, work in a team. Now we have everything to start implementing ideas straight away, as a result reach the finals, of course!”
To learn more about the DREAM socialbot architecture created for the previous competition, check out the technical report of the team from the previous 2019 competition. Guys have drastically transformed the original bot and released the first version of their artificial intelligence-driven assistant since then. DREAM AI bot is available on the demo website and in the Telegram messenger.
The Alexa Challenge is a student competition. It was first launched in 2016. The challenge is dedicated to the advancement of conversational artificial intelligence technologies. Teams have to develop a social bot that communicates fluently with people about news and popular topics such as entertainment, sports, politics, technology, and fashion through Alexa devices. The ultimate goal is to score 4 out of 5 points and engage the judges in dialogues that last more than 20 minutes in the final round.
This time there are nine teams participating, including the past winners of Alexa Challenge 3 from Emory University, Stanford, and Czech Technical University. Bot prototyping will begin in November, and the winner will be announced in August 2021.
Each team will receive a $250,000 research grant, access to cloud computing in Amazon Web Services, and support from Alexa developers. Such competitions push the whole industry of artificial intelligence forward a lot, so we want to wish luck and marvelous results to all of the participants!
Originally published at https://mipt.ru
