Monday, October 17, 2016

Amazon Launches $2.5 Million AI Contest for College Students - Sri Ravipati, Campus Technology

A new contest from Amazon aims to accelerate the field of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and make its Alexa voice assistant even more chatty. The inaugural Alexa Prize contest challenges university and college students around the world to develop a “socialbot” that can that can hold a conversation with a human for 20 minutes. Students will use the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) to build their socialbots. They will advance several areas of conversational AI, including “knowledge of acquisition, natural language understanding, natural language generation, context modeling, commonsense reasoning and dialog planning,” according to the Amazon announcement. https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/09/30/amazon-launches-$2.5-million-ai-contest-for-college-students.aspx