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Location: Prague, Czech Republic
Faculty advisor: Jan Sedivy

Alquist (2019)

We love academic research in artificial intelligence as well as cooperating on practical projects with companies.

By Czech Technical University in Prague
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We are proud of living in the country where the word “robot” was first used in the play called R.U.R. written by Karel Capek. Our team has worked tightly together for more than two years. We love academic research in artificial intelligence as well as cooperating on practical projects with companies. We would like to build on our existing accomplishments and push abilities of conversational AI forward.

Jan P. - Team leader

Jan finished his Bachelors degree in 2014 in Software Engineering at the Faculty of Informatics, Czech Technical University (CTU). After that, he started his Masters degree in Artificial Intelligence and finished in 2016 at Faculty of Electrical Engineering, CTU. Currently, he is pursuing Ph.D. degree focused on dialogue systems. He is one of the contributors to open-source YodaQA system. In 2017, he worked on Alquist dialogue system during Alexa Prize 2017 and 2018. In 2018, he was included in the list "30 under 30" by Forbes CZ magazine.

Petr M.

Petr Marek is a Ph.D. student of artificial intelligence at Czech Technical University in Prague. His primary focus is conversational AI and dialogue management. He was developing socialbot Alquist during Alexa Prize '17 and '18. He experiments with a novel combination of movies and conversational AI (https://movies.alquistai.com/). He had talks at TEDx and PechaKucha night and pitch at Singularity University. He volunteers as scoutmaster. He developed touchless video game controller which he exhibited at Maker Faire (http://notouch.petr-marek.com/). He likes to work on various projects about which he writes a blog (http://petr-marek.com/).

Van Duy T.

Van Duy finished his bachelor's degree in Informatics and Computer science at the FEE CTU in 2018. The topic of his bachelor's thesis was Entity Linking and Disambiguation Using a Dialogue where he gained interest in NLP. At the moment he is pursuing his master's degree in Data Science major. Recently, he spent one semester at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Moreover, he also experienced short term computer science courses at the Gdansk University of Technology in Poland, the Polytechnic University of Madrid in Spain and KU Leuven in Belgium.

Jakub K.

Jakub is currently working on his Ph.D. at the CTU Prague. He focuses on Question Answering problems, Sentiment Analysis, and Conversational Design. He developed the Alquist Dialogue Manager and the framework for bot creation. After completing his Bachelors degree in Cybernetics and Robotics at CTU in 2015, he continued his master's studies. He graduated in 2018 with a thesis on Unstructured text comprehension and question answering. During his graduate studies, he also co-created a voice-activated assistant for weather forecast and news information.

Petr L.

Petr is currently studying at CTU with a primary focus on Machine Learning and NLP. During his studies, he spent one semester at the NTUT in Taiwan as an exchange student. He attends many conferences on AI and software engineering, frequently as a volunteer. Besides other things, Petr has experience in developing a recommendation system for large scale system and developing for Android. In his leisure time, he loves to travel the world and exercise. He shares various ideas and thoughts on his blog petrlorenc.github.io.

Jan Sedivy - Faculty advisor

Jan Sedivy has after 18 years experience in the industry returned to CTU, CIIRC. Currently, he is leading the NLP group at CTU. He has worked in Google (2008-2010) as a Technical Lead Manager and in IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He was a research staff member (1992-2000) and research manager (2000-2008). He has been leading many worldwide research and development projects. He holds 19 US patents. His interests are AI, ML, NLU, mobile, Internet, cloud computing: https://sedivy.github.io/CV/.

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