Ten university teams selected for Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2

Second iteration features five new teams.

Amazon today announced that ten teams from around the globe have been selected to participate in the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge year 2, a university challenge focused on developing multimodal (voice and vision) conversational agents that assist customers in completing tasks requiring multiple steps and decisions.

Alexa Prize is a flagship industry-academic collaboration dedicated to accelerating the science of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and multimodal human-AI interactions.

“Prize competitions provide an agile science experimentation framework for researchers and students encouraging them to explore transformational ideas at the boundaries of what is achievable,” said Reza Ghanadan, senior principal scientist with Alexa AI and head of Alexa Prize. “We have developed the CoBot platform and tools to lower the barriers to AI innovation for both the academic research community and students interested in conversational AI assistants. These tools allow students to quickly deploy their solutions at scale in the real world with Alexa, then observe, evaluate, and enhance their research results using feedback from Alexa customers.”

Photo of Participants in the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge Bootcamp
The Alexa Prize TaskBot Bootcamp was held in Seattle, Washington, with representatives from all ten university teams.

The teams selected for the challenge, which began in January, feature five returning entrants — including the top three finishers in the most recent challenge — and five new universities.

Team

University

Faculty advisor

Returning

TWIZNOVA School of Science and TechnologyJoão Magalhães
EvoquerBOTPenn State UniversityRui Zhang
Taco 2.0The Ohio State UniversityHuan Sun
GRILLUniversity of GlasgowJeff Dalton
MarunaUniversity of Massachusetts AmherstHamed Zamani

New

BoilerBotPurdue UniversityJulia Rayz
DiWBotRutgers UniversityMatthew Stone
SageUniversity of California, Santa CruzXin (Eric) Wang
ISABELUniversity of PittsburghMalihe Alikhani
PLAN-BotVirginia TechIsmini Lourentzou

The prizes for overall performance in the competition will be $500,000 for the first-place team, $100,000 for second, and $50,000 for third. Those prizes will be paid out to the students on the teams with the best overall performance.

“I am delighted to see that new teams are joining the second year of the competition together with returning teams, who, by competing again, are signaling to us that they found value in the TaskBot challenge, said Yoelle Maarek, vice president research and science for Amazon Shopping.  

“We expect these talented graduate students to continue surprising us, as well as Amazon customers, this year. Connecting academia, Amazonians, and actual customers experimenting with taskbots, is a winning combination to keep pushing the boundaries of science in conversational AI for Alexa to delight and ease the lives of millions of customers.”

The Alexa Prize is a competition for university students dedicated to advancing the field of conversational AI. Launched in 2016, the program was created to recognize students from around the globe who are changing the way we interact with technology.

TaskBot Challenge 2 teams are working to address one of the hardest problems in conversational AI — creating next-generation conversational AI experiences that delight customers by addressing their changing needs as they complete complex tasks. This challenge builds upon the Alexa Prize’s foundation of providing universities a unique opportunity to test cutting-edge machine learning models with actual customers at scale.

The Alexa Prize TaskBot challenge provides a realistic scenario with real-user multimodal interactions, making this the perfect setting to observe and measure human-bot conversations and AI algorithms in a groundbreaking setting.
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Rafael Ferreira, NOVA School of Science and Technology, Team TWIZ
Our vision of EvoquerBOT combines improving task completion rates and elevating user satisfaction. To this end, we deliver innovative solutions to fundamental NLP challenges.
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Haoran Zhang, Penn State University, Team EvoquerBOT
We are especially interested in developing innovative ways to achieve successful coordination of multiple modalities, such as visual and verbal elements, and create a more engaging and intuitive user experience.
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Lingbo Mo, The Ohio State University, Team Taco 2.0
The GRILL team is excited to continue bringing cutting-edge AI research to improve people’s lives. Our research team works on new capabilities of foundation models that understand text, images, and the surrounding world.
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Sophie Fischer, University of Glasgow, Team GRILL
The competition lets us create interfaces for the general public in a production environment – it’s a unique opportunity to connect our research with our career goals.
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Baber Khalid, Rutgers University, Team DiWBot
We are very excited to be part of the community and look forward to working with the Alexa team and other teams.
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Anthony Sicilia, University of Pittsburgh, Team ISABEL
The Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge combines a vast range of tasks over multiple domains with multimodal outputs. This is the ultimate test for any moonshot concept, and we can't wait to see what the real world has in store for us.
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Rey (Alex) Gonzalez, Purdue University, Team BoilerBot
Participating in this competition is an incredible opportunity that will allow us to do applied research and ship it to real users.
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Chris Samarinas, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Team Maruna
Although artificial intelligence has experienced explosive development in the past decade, there is still a gap between research and real-world application. The TaskBot Challenge provides us with a unique opportunity to explore multimodal AI in practical situations.
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Kaizhi Zheng Univerisity of California, Santa Cruz-Amherst, Team Sage
Our bot will make adaptable conversation a reality by allowing customers to follow personalized decisions through the completion of multiple, sequential sub-tasks and adapt to the tools, materials, or ingredients available to the user by proposing appropriate substitutes and alternatives.
Afrina Tabassum
Afrina Tabassum

TaskBot is the first conversational AI challenge to incorporate multimodal customer experiences, so in addition to receiving verbal instructions, customers with Echo Show or Fire TV devices, can also be presented with step-by-step instructions, images, or diagrams that enhance task guidance.

This year’s challenge has been expanded to include more hobbies and at-home activities. Participating teams were asked to propose interesting ways to incorporate visual aids into every conversation turn when a screen is available. Innovative ideas on improving the presentation of visual aids, as well as the coordination of visual and verbal modalities, were part of the team selection criteria.

Each university selected for the challenge receives a $250,000 research grant, Alexa-enabled devices, free Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing services to support their research and development efforts, access to Amazon scientists, the CoBot (conversational bot) toolkit and other tools such as automated speech recognition through Alexa, neural detection and generation models, conversational data sets, and design guidance and development support from the Alexa Prize team.

"Alexa, let's work together"

The university teams’ taskbots will be available for Alexa customers to engage with in May 2023 with a finals event being held in September, and winners announced later that month.

As with the previous challenge, Alexa customers can engage in conversation with teams’ taskbots when they become available in May by saying, “Alexa, let’s work together.” Until then, “Alexa, let’s work together” will direct you to conversations with the previous challenge winners of 2022 and the Alexa Prize TaskBot.

After initiating the interaction, Alexa customers then receive a brief message informing them that they are interacting with an Alexa Prize university taskbot before being randomly connected to one of the participating taskbots.

After exiting the conversation with the taskbot, which customers can do at any time, the customer is prompted for a verbal rating, followed by an option to provide additional feedback. The interactions, ratings, and feedback are shared with the teams to help them improve their taskbots. Customer ratings are also used to determine which university teams will move on to the semifinals and finals.

Our goal is to contribute to the multimodal conversational AI field and move it closer to the way humans perceive, reason, and communicate through multimodal information.
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João Magalhães, associate professor, NOVA School of Science and Technology, Team TWIZ
We look forward to the Challenge because it is the perfect platform to create multimodal, tasked-oriented dialogue systems that elevate user experience and engagement.
rui_zhang.jpeg
Rui Zhang, assistant professor, Penn State University, Team EvoquerBOT
Through this TaskBot Challenge, we hope our work can expand the horizon of conversational AI along dimensions like dialogue depth, multi-modal coordination, commonsense reasoning, and learning from use.
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Huan Sun, associate professor, The Ohio State University, Team Taco 2.0
The GRILL team is creating the next generation of open assistants that understand and use knowledge about the world and can communicate effectively to inform and educate.
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Jeff Dalton, associate professor, University of Glasgow, Team GRILL
Our TaskBot will help people get things done through personalized, adaptive, and context-aware conversational interaction by combining our research results with the state-of-the-art capabilities of Alexa devices.
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Matthew Stone, professor, Rutgers University, Team DiWBot
We work towards making conversational AI technology more inclusive and collaborative. Inclusive Alexa can collaborate with users from diverse cultures and with different communication capabilities and preferences.
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Malihe Alikhani, assistant professor, University of Pittsburgh, Team ISABEL
We hope to develop a task-oriented system that can interact with users based on their level of knowledge, experience, and communication preference.
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Julia Rayz, professor, Purdue University, Team BoilerBot

Success in the previous TaskBot Challenge required teams to address many difficult AI obstacles. The challenge required the fusion of multiple AI techniques including knowledge representation and inference, commonsense and causal reasoning, and language understanding and generation.

The “GRILLBot” team from University of Glasgow won the TaskBot 1 Challenge, earning a $500,000 prize for its performance. Teams from NOVA School of Science and Technology (Portgual) and The Ohio State University earned second- and third-place prizes, respectively.

Research papers from Amazon’s Alexa Prize team, and each of the competing teams, can be viewed and downloaded here.

Alexa Prize Taskbot Challenge Finals | Amazon Science

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Are you passionate about programming languages, applying formal verification, program analysis, constraint-solving, and/or theorem proving to real world problems? Do you want to create products that help customers? If so, then we have an exciting opportunity for you. In this role, you will interact with internal teams and external customers to understand their requirements. You will apply your knowledge to propose innovative solutions, create software prototypes, and productize prototypes into production systems using software development tools and methodologies. In addition, you will support and scale your solutions to meet the ever growing demand of customer use. Technical Responsibilities: - Interact with various teams to develop an understanding of their security and safety requirements. - Apply the acquired knowledge to build tools find problems, or show the absence of security/safety problems. - Implement these tools through the use of SAT, SMT, and various concepts from programming languages, theorem proving, formal verification and constraint solving. - Perform analysis of the customer systems using tools developed in-house or externally provided - Create software prototypes to verify and validate the devised solutions methodologies; integrate the prototypes into production systems using standard software development tools and methodologies. Leadership Responsibilities: - Can present and defend company-wide technical decisions to the internal technical community and represent the company effectively at technical conferences. - Functional thought leader, sought after for key tech decisions. Can successfully sell ideas to an executive level decision maker. - Mentors and trains the research scientist community on complex technical issues. AWS has the most services and more features within those services, than any other cloud provider–from infrastructure technologies like compute, storage, and databases–to emerging technologies, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, data lakes and analytics, and Internet of Things. Whether its Identity features such as access management and sign on, cryptography, console, builder & developer tools, and even projects like automating all of our contractual billing systems, AWS Platform is always innovating with the customer in mind. The AWS Platform team sustains over 750 million transactions per second. We have a formal mentor search application that lets you find a mentor that works best for you based on location, job family, job level etc. Your manager can also help you find a mentor or two, because two is better than one. In addition to formal mentors, we work and train together so that we are always learning from one another, and we celebrate and support the career progression of our team members. Key job responsibilities Technical Responsibilities: - Interact with various teams to develop an understanding of their security and safety requirements. - Apply the acquired knowledge to build tools find problems, or show the absence of security/safety problems. - Implement these tools through the use of SAT, SMT, BDDs, and various concepts from programming languages, theorem proving, formal verification and constraint solving. - Perform analysis of the customer systems using tools developed in-house or externally provided - Create software prototypes to verify and validate the devised solutions methodologies; integrate the prototypes into production systems using standard software development tools and methodologies. Leadership Responsibilities: - Can present and defend company-wide technical decisions to the internal technical community and represent the company effectively at technical conferences. - Functional thought leader, sought after for key tech decisions. Can successfully sell ideas to an executive level decision maker. - Mentors and trains the research scientist community on complex technical issues. A day in the life You will be working on cutting edge technology related to formal methods, automated reasoning, automated testing, and adjacent areas. You will work with fellow applied scientists to solve challenging problems that provide value to customers by improving the quality of software. You will have an opportunity to publish your work. 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. 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. About the team The Automated Reasoning in Identity (ARI) team is growing fast. It works on applying automated reasoning techniques to services within AWS's Identity organization, building on initial successes of the Zelkova and Access Analyzer projects. The reach of AR within Identity is growing, with more scientists joining all the time.