Thursday, 24 November 2016

Socialbots: UniTrento to partecipate in the Amazon challenge

Together with other 12 universities, Trento is the only Italian university to participate in the international competition to advance conversational artificial intelligence

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The University of Trento will participate in the prestigious Alexa Prize, the competition launched by Amazon on artificial intelligence for human-machine communication, in which every year university teams from all over the world compete against each other.

Students from 12 universities, four of which are European, will participate in this year’s edition: Carnegie-Mellon University, Czech Technical, Prague University, Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Santa Cruz, University of Edinburgh, University of Montreal, University of Trento, University of Washington - Seattle.The group of the students with the Professor Riccardi

On the team are Alessandra Cervone, Giuliano Tortoreto, Enrico Gambi e Stefano Mezza students of the research group led by professor Giuseppe Riccardi of the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science.

More than a hundred university teams from 22 countries submitted their applications to participate in the Alexa Prize, sponsored by the giant of online shopping Amazon.

The goal of the challenge is to train Alexa to converse with users on popular subjects, as if it were a real person. A “socialbot” is a type of automated software that uses the web as human beings do (chats, videogames and webpages, for instance). They are becoming more and more advanced to the point that sometimes it is difficult to tell if we are talking to a human or a computer.

The winner will receive a prize of 500,000 euro. But if a team succeeds in having Alexa converse coherently and engagingly for twenty minutes, it will earn an extra prize of 1 million dollars.

The teams will receive 100,000 euro and other benefits (connection to Alexa, free web services and Amazon cloud), in addition to support from the Alexa team for any questions.
To build their socialbots students will use the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), a system that is already widely used all over the world. Alexa users from the US market will decide who will advance to the finals, scheduled in November 2017.

The student team, named Roving Mind, is already working on the next stage, the semifinals qualifications, that will take place in August 2017.

Contest rules and other information can be found on this website: https://developer.amazon.com/alexaprize/contest-rules