Dear Colleagues, I am excited to draw your attention to the new Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge. Teams will develop multimodal conversational systems that assist customers in completing real-world tasks, initially focusing on Cooking and Home Improvement domains. Success in the challenge will require participants to advance the state of the art in conversational AI, and address difficult science challenges related to knowledge representation and inference, commonsense and causal reasoning, and language understanding and generation, among others. It is also the first Alexa Prize challenge to incorporate multimodal (voice and visual) customer experience, so that in addition to receiving verbal instructions, customers with Echo screen devices could also be presented with step-by-step instructions, images, or diagrams to enhance task guidance. You can find out more on the Challenge website, www.alexaprize.com<http://www.alexaprize.com>, including more details about the challenge presented at the Taskbot Virtual Roadshow last week: https://developer.amazon.com/alexaprize/events/roadshow/roadshow-on-demand The deadline to apply is April 16, 2021. Up to ten teams will be selected to participate in the challenge by June 11, and the competition will begin on June 14. The year-long competition will conclude in May 2022, with winners announced in June 2022. The selected teams receive a $250,000 research grant, Alexa-enabled devices, free Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing to support their research and development efforts, access to the TaskBot Toolkit, and other resources, data, and Alexa team support. The winning team receives a $500,000 prize, and the second- and third-place team receive prizes of $100,000 and $50,000, respectively. This is an exciting opportunity for students to try their research ideas in the "real world" by interacting with thousands of users, and to collect unparalleled data for research. And, speaking as a past participant, it's great fun for the faculty advisors too 🙂 We hope you consider participating, and forward to your students and colleagues who might be interested! Please feel free to reach out with any questions to alexaprizesupport@amazon.com Best wishes, and good luck with the rest of the semester, Eugene ------------------------------------------------- Eugene Agichtein Winship Professor of Computer Science Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA Amazon Scholar, Alexa Shopping Academic page: www.cs.emory.edu/~eugene Research: IR Lab: http://ir.mathcs.emory.edu ________________________________ This e-mail message (including any attachments) is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this message (including any attachments) is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please contact the sender by reply e-mail message and destroy all copies of the original message (including attachments).