TMH is one of the 8 teams to compete on the 2018 Amazon Alexa Challenge
The Alexa Prize is a $3.5 million university challenge to advance conversational AI. The teams 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.
A total of 195 teams declared interest to compete in the Alexa Prize, but only eight were selected - five from USA and three from Europe. The eight teams are:
- Alana, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland
- Alquist, Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic
- Emerson Conversational Search Agent, Emory University, Atlanta, GA
- EVE, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT
- Gunrock, UC Davis, Davis, CA
- KTH Fantastic, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
- SlugBot, UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA
- Tartan, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
Each team will receive a $250,000 research grant, Alexa-enabled devices, free Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support their development efforts, access to new Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) APIs, and tools, data and support from the Alexa team.
A $500,000 prize will be awarded to the team selected for creating the best socialbot. The second- and third-place teams will receive prizes of $100,000 and $50,000, respectively. Additionally, a $1 million research grant will be awarded to the winning team’s university if their socialbot achieves the grand challenge of conversing coherently and engagingly with humans for 20 minutes with a 4.0 or higher rating.
The KTH team
The KTH team consisted of Gabriel Skantze (faculty advisor), Patrik Jonell (team leader), Per Fallgren och Dimosthenis Kontogiorgos.
The KTH team advisors
The advisors team consisted of Johan Boye, Jose David Lopes and Mattias Bystedt.
