Alexa Prize Proceedings

The Alexa Prize Proceedings publishes the research in conversational AI from the competition. Amazon works closely with university teams to provide a testbed for research to address the challenges with dialog management, natural language understanding, contextual modeling, commonsense reasoning and response generation, and these proceedings seek to capture the advances in those areas that result from these efforts. Authors are free to make additional hardcopy publishing arrangements, but Amazon will not produce hardcopies of these volumes.
93 results found
  • Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 4 Proceedings
    2021
    In this report, we present the DREAM 2 Socialbot design and share scientific and technology contributions made towards developing a fluent and meaningful socialbot for Alexa Prize 4. Building on top of the last year’s solution we added a rich plethora of the script-driven skills created with the help of the novel Dialogue Flow Framework. To lay down the foundation for the discourse-driven dialogue strategy
  • Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
    Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 4 Proceedings
    2021
    This paper describes the architecture, methodology and results of the Genuine2 chatbot for the Alexa Socialbot Grand Challenge 4. In contrast to previous years, our bot heavily relies on the usage of different types of generative models coordinated through on a dialogue management policy that targets dialogue coherence and topic continuity. Different dialogue generators were incorporated to give variability
  • Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 4 Proceedings
    2021
    Building open domain conversational systems that allow users to have engaging conversations on topics of their choice is a challenging task. The Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge was launched in 2016 to tackle the problem of achieving natural, sustained, coherent and engaging open-domain dialogs. In the fourth iteration of the competition, university teams have incorporated semantic parsing, common
  • University of California, Santa Cruz
    Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 4 Proceedings
    2020
    Conversational agents are consistently growing in popularity and many people interact with them every day. While many conversational agents act as personal assistants, they can have many different goals. Some are task-oriented, such as providing customer support for a bank or making a reservation. Others are designed to be empathetic and to form emotional connections with the user. The Alexa Prize Challenge
  • Prem Natarajan
    Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 3 Proceedings
    2019
    With the launch of Alexa in 2014, Amazon sparked a renaissance in conversational AI. Combining far-field speech recognition with state-of-the-art natural language understanding, Alexa captured the imagination of millions of users worldwide. All of them had discovered that speech is, indeed, the most natural of user interfaces! In the summer of 2015, the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) was launched with the goal
  • Emory University
    Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 3 Proceedings
    2019
    Inspired by studies on the overwhelming presence of experience-sharing in human- human conversations, Emora, the social chatbot developed by Emory University, aims to bring such experience-focused interaction to the current field of conver- sational AI. The traditional approach of information-sharing topic handlers is balanced with a focus on opinion-oriented exchanges that Emora delivers, and new conversational
  • Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 3 Proceedings
    2019
    Building conversational systems that enable natural language interactions with machines has been an attractive research area since the early days of computing, as exemplified by earlier text-based systems such as ELIZA [Weizenbaum, 1966]. The research and development work in this area has been increasing since then, with many publications on both task-oriented [Hosseini-Asl et al, 2020; Papangelis et al
  • Stanford University
    Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 3 Proceedings
    2019
    We present Chirpy Cardinal, an open-domain dialogue agent, as a research plat- form for the 2019 Alexa Prize competition. Building an open-domain socialbot that talks to real people is challenging – such a system must meet multiple user expectations such as broad world knowledge, conversational style, and emotional connection. Our socialbot engages users on their terms – prioritizing their interests, feelings
  • Czech Technical University in Prague
    Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 3 Proceedings
    2019
    The third version of the open-domain dialogue system Alquist developed within the Alexa Prize 2020 competition is designed to conduct coherent and engaging conversations on popular topics. The main novel contribution is the introduction of a system leveraging an innovative approach based on a conversational knowledge graph and adjacency pairs. The conversational knowledge graph allows the system to utilize
  • University of California, Davis
    Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 3 Proceedings
    2019
    Gunrock 2.0 is built on top of Gunrock with an emphasis on user adaptation. Gunrock 2.0 combines various neural natural language understanding modules, including named entity detection, linking, and dialog act prediction, to improve user understanding. Its dialog management is a hierarchical model that handles various topics, such as movies, music, and sports. The system-level dialog manager can handle

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US, WA, Bellevue
Welcome to the Worldwide Returns & ReCommerce team (WWR&R) at Amazon.com. WWR&R is an agile, innovative organization dedicated to ‘making zero happen’ to benefit our customers, our company, and the environment. Our goal is to achieve the three zeroes: zero cost of returns, zero waste, and zero defects. We do this by developing groundbreaking products and driving truly innovative operational excellence to help customers keep what they buy, recover returned and damaged product value, keep thousands of tons of waste from landfills, and create the best customer returns experience in the world. We have an eye to the future – we create long-term value at Amazon by focusing not just on the bottom line, but on the planet. We are building the most sustainable re-use channel we can by driving multiple aspects of the Circular Economy for Amazon – Returns & ReCommerce. Amazon WWR&R is comprised of business, product, operational, program, software engineering and data teams that manage the life of a returned or damaged product from a customer to the warehouse and on to its next best use. Our work is broad and deep: we train machine learning models to automate routing and find signals to optimize re-use; we invent new channels to give products a second life; we develop highly respected product support to help customers love what they buy; we pilot smarter product evaluations; we work from the customer backward to find ways to make the return experience remarkably delightful and easy; and we do it all while scrutinizing our business with laser focus. You will help create everything from customer-facing and vendor-facing websites to the internal software and tools behind the reverse-logistics process. You can develop scalable, high-availability solutions to solve complex and broad business problems. We are a group that has fun at work while driving incredible customer, business, and environmental impact. We are backed by a strong leadership group dedicated to operational excellence that empowers a reasonable work-life balance. As an established, experienced team, we offer the scope and support needed for substantial career growth. Amazon is earth’s most customer-centric company and through WWR&R, the earth is our customer too. Come join us and innovate with the Amazon Worldwide Returns & ReCommerce team! Key job responsibilities * Design, develop, and evaluate highly innovative models for Natural Language Programming (NLP), Large Language Model (LLM), or Large Computer Vision Models. * Use SQL to query and analyze the data. * Use Python, Jupyter notebook, and Pytorch to train/test/deploy ML models. * Use machine learning and analytical techniques to create scalable solutions for business problems. * Research and implement novel machine learning and statistical approaches. * Mentor interns. * Work closely with data & software engineering teams to build model implementations and integrate successful models and algorithms in production systems at very large scale. A day in the life If you are not sure that every qualification on the list above describes you exactly, we'd still love to hear from you! At Amazon, we value people with unique backgrounds, experiences, and skillsets. If you’re passionate about this role and want to make an impact on a global scale, please apply! Benefits: Amazon offers a full range of benefits that support you and eligible family members, including domestic partners and their children. Benefits can vary by location, the number of regularly scheduled hours you work, length of employment, and job status such as seasonal or temporary employment. The benefits that generally apply to regular, full-time employees include: 1. Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage 2. Maternity and Parental Leave Options 3. Paid Time Off (PTO) 4. 401(k) Plan Learn more about our benefits here: https://amazon.jobs/en/internal/benefits/us-benefits-and-stock About the team When a customer returns a package to Amazon, the request and package will be passed through our WWRR machine learning (ML) systems so that we could improve the customer experience, identify return root cause, optimize re-use, and evaluate the returned package. Our problems touch multiple modalities spanning from: textual, categorical, image, to speech data. We operate at large scale and rely on state-of-the-art modeling techniques to power our ML models: XGBoost, BERT, Vision Transformers, Large Language Models.
US, CA, Santa Clara
Amazon CloudWatch is the native AWS monitoring and observability service for cloud resources and applications. We are seeking a talented Senior Applied Scientist to develop next-generation scientific methods and infrastructure to support a core AWS business that delivers critical services to millions of customers operating at scale. This is a high visibility and high impact role that work on highly strategic projects in the AI/ML and Analytics space, will interact with all levels of AWS leadership. We are developing solutions that not only surface the “what” but also the “why” and “how to fix it”, without requiring operators to have extensive domain knowledge and technical expertise to efficiently troubleshoot and remediate incidents. Using decades of AWS operational excellence coupled with the advances in LLMs and Gen-AI technologies, we are transforming the very core of how customers can effortlessly interact with our offerings to build and operate their applications in the cloud. We are hiring to grow our team, and are looking for well-rounded applied scientists with backgrounds in machine learning, foundation models, and natural language processing. You'll be working with talented scientists, engineers, and product managers to innovate on behalf of our customers. If you're fired up about being part of a dynamic, mission driven team, then this is your moment to join us on this exciting journey! Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist II you will be responsible for * Research and development of algorithms that improve training of foundation models across pre-training, multitask learning, supervised finetuning, and reinforcement learning from human feedback * Research and development of novel approaches for anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and provide intelligent insights from vast amounts of monitoring and observability data * Collaborating with scientists, engineers, and Product Managers across CloudWatch team as well as directly with customers * Lead key science initiatives in strategic investment areas of AI/ML/LLM Ops and Observability * Be an industry thought leader representing Amazon at top-tier scientific conferences * Engaging in the hiring process and developing, growing, and mentoring junior scientists A day in the life Working closely with and across agile teams, you will be able to see and feel the impact of your work on our customers. This is a high visibility and high impact role that will interact with all levels of AWS leadership. Our ideal candidate is excited about the incredible opportunity that cloud monitoring represents and is deeply passionate about delivering the highest quality services leveraging AI/ML/LLMs. You’re naturally customer centric and thrive in a fast-paced environment that requires strong technical and business judgment and solid communication skills. About the team Amazon CloudWatch Logs is a core monitoring service used by millions of AWS customers. We move fast and have delivered remarkable products and features over the last few years to streamline how AWS customers troubleshoot their critical applications. Our mission is to be the most cost effective, integrated, fast, and secure logs management and analytics platform for AWS customers. We are a diverse group of product and engineering professionals that are passionate about delivering logging features that delight customers operating at any scale. Why AWS Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses. Utility Computing (UC) AWS Utility Computing (UC) provides product innovations — from foundational services such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), to consistently released new product innovations that continue to set AWS’s services and features apart in the industry. As a member of the UC organization, you’ll support the development and management of Compute, Database, Storage, Internet of Things (IoT), Platform, and Productivity Apps services in AWS, including support for customers who require specialized security solutions for their cloud services. Inclusive Team Culture Here at AWS, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud. Mentorship and Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Diverse Experiences Amazon values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying.
US, MA, Boston
The Automated Reasoning Group is looking for a Applied Scientist with expertise in programming language semantics and deductive verification techniques (e.g. Lean, Dafny) to deliver novel code reasoning capabilities at scale. You will be part of a larger organization that develops a spectrum of formal software analysis tools and applies them to software at all levels of abstraction from assembler through high-level programming languages. You will work with a team of world class automated reasoning experts to deliver code reasoning technology that is accessible to all developers.
NL, Amsterdam
Are you interested in creating a large business impact on millions of customers through the use of machine learning and analytics? We are seeking an Data Scientist to join our PriMA (Prime & Marketing) science team to model customer behavior, improve the engagement of our existing customers, and help us grow our customer base. In this role, you will collaborate with cross-functional teams and stakeholders to solve problems, and you will regularly interact with software engineering teams and business leadership. Some of the technical challenges you will contribute in this role are: - Measuring marketing campaigns across external marketing channels (Youtube, TikTok, Google,....) - Modeling the causal impact that some actions have over customers. - Building better product recommendation for deals and promotions at Amazon Key job responsibilities - Develop accurate and scalable data science models to address business use cases ranging from: analyzing customer behavior, building recommender systems to increase engagement, or measuring the impact of marketing channels. - Partner with engineers and applied scientists to implement data science solutions for complex business problems, guiding the application of best practices in data analysis, statistical modeling, and machine learning. - Lead comprehensive data analyses to provide insights and recommendations that help management and business stakeholders make key strategic decisions. About the team The PRIMAS (Prime & Marketing Analytics and Science) is the team that support the science & analytics needs of the EU Prime and Marketing organization, an org that supports the Prime and Marketing programs in European marketplaces and comprises 250-300 employees. The PRIMAS team, is part of a larger tech tech team of 50 people (comprising other job families like SDEs) that gives support to all the tech needs of the Prime & marketing org.
US, WA, Seattle
This is a unique opportunity to join a small, high-impact team working on AI agents for health initiatives. You will lead the crucial data foundation of our project, managing health data acquisition, processing, and model evaluation, while also contributing to machine learning model development. Your work will directly influence the creation and improvement of AI solutions that could significantly impact how individuals manage their daily health and long-term wellness goals. If you're passionate about leveraging data and developing ML models to solve meaningful problems in healthcare through AI, this role is for you. You'll work on large-scale data processing, design annotation workflows, develop evaluation metrics, and contribute to the machine learning algorithms that drive the performance of our health AI agents. You'll have the chance to innovate alongside healthcare experts and data scientists. In this early-stage initiative, you'll have significant influence on our data strategies and ML approaches, shaping how they drive our AI solutions. This is an excellent opportunity for a high-judgment data scientist with ML expertise to demonstrate impact and make key decisions that will form the backbone of our health AI initiatives. Key job responsibilities Be the complete owner for health data acquisition, processing, and quality assurance Design and oversee data annotation workflows Collaborate on data sourcing strategies Lead health data acquisition and processing initiatives Manage AI agent example annotation processes Develop and implement data evaluation metrics Design, implement, and evaluate machine learning models for AI agents, with a focus on improving natural language understanding and generation in health contexts A day in the life You'll work with a cross-disciplinary team to source, evaluate, and leverage health data for AI agent development. You'll shape data acquisition strategies, annotation workflows, and machine learning models to enhance our AI's health knowledge. Expect to dive deep into complex health datasets, challenge conventional data evaluation metrics, and continuously refine our AI agents' ability to understand and respond to health-related queries.
BR, SP, Sao Paulo
Esta é uma posição de colaborador individual, com base em nosso escritório de São Paulo. Procuramos uma pessoa dinâmica, analítica, inovadora, orientada para a prática e com foco inabalável no cliente. Na Amazon, nosso objetivo é exceder as expectativas dos clientes, garantindo que seus pedidos sejam entregues com máxima rapidez, precisão e eficiência de custo. A determinação da rota de cada pacote é realizada por sistemas complexos, que precisam acompanhar o crescimento acelerado e a complexidade da malha logística no Brasil. Diante desse cenário, a equipe de Otimização de Supply Chain está à procura de um cientista de dados experiente, capaz de desenvolver modelos, ferramentas e processos para garantir confiabilidade, agilidade, eficiência de custos e a melhor utilização dos ativos. O candidato ideal terá sólidas habilidades quantitativas e experiência com conjuntos de dados complexos, sendo capaz de identificar tendências, inovar processos e tomar decisões baseadas em dados, considerando a cadeia de suprimentos de ponta a ponta. Key job responsibilities * Executar projetos de melhoria contínua na malha logística, aproveitando boas práticas de outros países e/ou desenvolvendo novos modelos. * Desenvolver modelos de otimização e cenários para planejamentos logísticos. * Criar modelos de otimização voltados para a execução de eventos e períodos de alta demanda. Automatizar processos manuais para melhorar a produtividade da equipe. * Auditar operações, configurações sistêmicas e processos que possam impactar custos, produtividade e velocidade de entregas. * Realizar benchmarks com outros países para identificar melhores práticas e processos avançados, conectando-os às operações no Brasil. About the team Nosso time é composto por engenheiros de dados, gerentes de projetos e cientistas de dados, todos dedicados a criar soluções escaláveis e inovadoras que suportem e otimizem as operações logísticas da Amazon no Brasil. Nossa missão é garantir a eficiência de todas as etapas da cadeia de suprimentos, desde a primeira até a última milha, ajudando a Amazon a entregar resultados com agilidade, precisão e a um custo competitivo, especialmente em um ambiente de rápido crescimento e complexidade.
US, WA, Bellevue
Ring is looking for a Senior Applied Science Manager to lead the development of computer vision algorithm on the Edge. In this role, you will be the leader of our passionate, talented, and inventive scientists, to develop industry-leading Computer Vision (CV), Multimodal, and AI and drive them successfully to production for the benefit of millions of Amazon Devices users. This is a unique, high visibility opportunity for a leader who wants to have business impact, and dive deep into computer vision problems. We are particularly interested in candidates with experience productizing edge-based computer vision systems. Key job responsibilities As a Senior Manager, Applied Science, you bring structure to ambiguous business problems and use science, logic, and practical experience to decompose them into straightforward, scalable solutions. You set the standard for scientific excellence and make decisions that affect the way we build and integrate algorithms. Your solutions are exemplary in terms of algorithm design, clarity, model structure, efficiency, and extensibility. You tackle intrinsically hard problems; you're interested in learning; and you acquire skills and expertise as needed. The ideal candidate is a strong, creative and highly-motivated Scientist with hands-on experience in leading multiple research and engineering initiatives. You balance technical leadership with strong business judgment to make the right decisions about technology, tools, and methodologies.
US, MA, Boston
The Automated Reasoning Group is looking for a Applied Scientist with expertise in programming language semantics and deductive verification techniques (e.g. Lean, Dafny) to deliver novel code reasoning capabilities at scale. You will be part of a larger organization that develops a spectrum of formal software analysis tools and applies them to software at all levels of abstraction from assembler through high-level programming languages. You will work with a team of world class automated reasoning experts to deliver code reasoning technology that is accessible to all developers.
US, CA, San Francisco
We are hiring an Economist with the ability to disambiguate very challenging structural problems in two and multi-sided markets. The right hire will be able to get dirty with the data to come up with stylized facts, build reduced form model that motivate structural assumptions, and build to more complex structural models. The main use case will be understanding the incremental effects of subsidies to a two sided market relate to sales motions characterized by principal agent problems. Key job responsibilities This role with interface directly with product owners, scientists/economists, and leadership to create multi-year research agendas that drive step change growth for the business. The role will also be an important collaborator with other science teams at AWS. A day in the life Our team takes big swings and works on hard cross organizational problems where the optimal success rate is not 100%. We also ask people to grow their skills and stretch and make sure we do it in a supportive and fun environment. It’s about empirically measured impact, advancement, and fun on our team. We work hard during work hours but we also don’t encourage working at nights or on weekends except in very rare, high stakes cases. Burn out isn’t a successful long run strategy. Because we invest in the long run success of our group it’s important to have hobbies, relax and then come to work refreshed and excited. It makes for bigger impact, faster skill accrual and thus career advancement. About the team Our group is technically rigorous and encourages ongoing academic conference participation and publication. Our leaders are here for you and to enable you to be successful. We believe in being servant leaders focused on influence: good data work has little value if it doesn’t translate into actionable insights that are rolled out and impact the real economy. We are communication centric since being able to explain what we do ensures high success rates and lowers administrative churn. Also: we laugh a lot. If it’s not fun, what’s the point?
US, CA, San Diego
Do you want to be part of the team developing the future technology that impacts the customer experience of ground-breaking products? Then come join us and make history. We are looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientist with a background in AI, Gen AI, Machine Learning, NLP, to help build LLM solutions for Amazon core shopping. As an Applied Scientist, you will be working closely with a team of applied scientists and engineers to build systems that shape the future of Amazon's by automatically generating relevant content and building a whole page experience that is coherent, dynamic, and interesting. You will improve ranking and optimization in our algorithm. You will participate in driving features from idea to deployment, and your work will directly impact millions of customers.