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Student Team Wins Amazon Alexa Artificial Intelligence Challenge
- eBombzor 8y agoJust glancing through the teams it looks like UCD was the only team with a member (Chun-Yen C) that has industry experience. Everyone else pretty much stayed inside academia. Wonder how much of a factor that was to their success.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoThe teams were selected to compete. I wonder if a team heavy on industry experience would have been selected compete. Also, I wonder what Amazon gains from this? My cynical hat wants to think Amazon would have made the competitors sight over IP rights etc, but I haven’t looked in to the conditions of the completion so I’m spectacularly. Does anyone know how this is likely to pan out for the students, and not only those who won? Each team was given US$250,000, so it’s sort of paid work? I don’t particularly have a problem with a company fielding skills in that way, just pondering. 1. https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/9f406f35-c997-4d17-a6ac-89a35f69b661/announcing-the-2018-alexa-prize-participants https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/9f406f35-c997-...
- ppod 8y ago>Amazon would have made the competitors sight over IP rights etc, I would like to know this too. I think that since it is an academic competition, by default everything is open source and the method must be fully outlined in the system description paper, so I don't think IP would be an issue.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y agoJust because something is open source doesn't mean the IP is granted to everyone.
- dominotw 8y agoedit: comment was (unintentionally) offensive
- conroy 8y agoEDIT: Flagged. Thanks to masonic for teaching me how to use HN. EDIT: I'm not sure how making judgements based on the ethnicity of the team members is "unintentional". Give me a break.
- dominotw 8y agowhat judgement did i make? i am Asian myself
- conroy 8y agoYou insinuated that the team must be from China because a majority of the team members look Asian. I don't understand why you thought that was important enough to bring to attention.
- dominotw 8y ago> You insinuated that the team must be from China because a majority of the team members look Asian. I didn't say they must be from china. I said I thought its a Chinese university that won it, looking at the thumbnail. > I don't understand why you thought that was important enough to bring to attention. Agree that it wasn't a comment i should've made or is relevant. I was about to delete it but couldn't before u responded.
- ngcc_hk 8y agoI do not care how many chinese there. There should be at least 1/5 if one must be all equal. But the shock is where is the westerner (know this is American web site should I said American or just white). I know chinese has been represented well in computer field. But this is odd. When I learn AI from afar, most are westerner
- 8y ago
- mpfundstein 8y agoHow many of the students are actual us citizens?
- ekianjo 8y agoWhy is this a relevant question? They got their education from the university so the university deserves partial credit no matter the nationality of each student involved.
- conroy 8y agoThe challenge only featured teams from universities, so their nationality has nothing to do with anything.
- conroy 8y agoWhy does this matter in the slightest? The challenge featured teams[0] from Sweden, Scotland, the Czech Republic, and the United States. [0] https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/9f406f35-c997-4d17-a6ac-89a35f69b661/announcing-the-2018-alexa-prize-participants https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/9f406f35-c997-...
- govg 8y agoIn the US, ML/AI grad school has significant Chinese and Indian student population. It's not surprising to see this team composition.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> In the US, ML/AI grad school has significant Chinese and Indian student population It is somewhat surprising to see that, though. I suspected something like this just from the sample of author names on papers I occasionally skim. I'm curious what's the story behind this? Why ML/AI in particular, instead of other branches of CS?
- PakG1 8y agoWho said other branches of CS don't experience this?
- fuddle 8y agoIt would be nice to see more details on the method they used.
- adamnemecek 8y agoCzech Technical University number 2! The teams site http://alquistai.com http://alquistai.com
- dmckeon 8y agoSo, is 10 minutes enough to pass a Turing test, assuming speech counts equally to typed text? Or is that question like asking if a submarine can dog-paddle?
- B-Con 8y agoGlad to see my alma mater doing well. > Some of the distinguishing features of the bot included incorporating language disfluencies — pauses such as “hm” or “ah.” Note that Google recently faced backlash over this very feature demoed in their Virtual Assistant. I'm guessing that public sentiment won't last long, it's a natural part of human language and it feels funny when it's missing.
- sambull 8y agoAgreed the more we can trick users into thinking they are getting actual help the better
- ecocentrik 8y agoEach confrontation of the uncanny valley is an uncomfortable experience that gives us pause and causes us to consider the dangers of interacting with AI. It's a healthy learning experience that will linger with any part of the population that already distrusts AI. Since you probably want to sell to those people too, why not make allowances? Disfluencies and breath sounds are peculiar when they're missing from human speech, so not injecting them into AI speech would be an easy design choice to distinguish a speaker as artificial, perfect for Virtual Assistants. For theatrical functions, in video games and movies, it makes sense to add as many human vocal quirks as possible, even the occasional resonance obstructions to simulate colds or a whistle for gap teeth.
- nolok 8y agoI think you're trying to project and are seeing more than what there really is. For 99,9% of the people who have an issue with such things it's not about "oh, it's hiding very well as a human and could take over, I distrust AI more due to it". It's about the uncanny valley problem of our brain being pattern matcher, and having difficulties classifying the AI using these new features as the "human pattern" or the "AI pattern" and so we don't like it / feel weirded out by it. Give it a few years and suddenly it has become part of the AI pattern and all is well. I'm not saying distrust toward AI is growing or not growing, but that it doesn't even play at all in the public reaction to such AI features.
- saltedonion 8y agoHave they made the architecture of this bot public ?
- bengotow 8y agoDoes anyone have a recording of the 9 minute conversation? Would love to hear how this sounded in person. Tried to find it on Youtube and Google, no luck.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- catchmeifyoucan 8y agoYou can test a few of these by saying "Alexa, talk to me"
- choot 8y agoAsians have higher IQ than white people. Now with infrastructure in place, no wonder, they'll make huge progress in AI and genome editing. Any team at brain sports without huge proportion of Asian genetics is bound to lose (due to lesser IQ) as evident from this competition.
- choot 8y agoHighest IQ is found in Central Asia. The regions closer to Central Asia have higher IQ. This is the population which managed to move to North America and became what we call "Native Americans" well before Europeans. Again, this is due to higher IQ because of which they managed to surive in such a harsh migration. Some of them even moved towards South East where Chinese/Koreans/Japanese live. No wonder Asians are doing good at AI which obviously demonstrates their high IQ. Even when most of the Universities are descrimianting against Asians in the US. US has not managed to contain Chinese Communist Party. They've failed to assassinate any leader in China. What does it say? IQ explains all of this. At some point in time, Italians were at war with Central Asians, so they managed to inherit high IQ from central Asia. This explains the architectural achievements of Italy.
- choot 8y agoAsians have higher IQ than any other ethinic group. This explains why they do better at AI. I don't think anyone can downplay their IQ
- abhishek0318 8y agoProf. Zhou Yu explains her work on Situated Intelligent Interactive Systems here. You might find this useful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39T9ukI9HnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39T9ukI9HnQ
- visionscaper 8y agoIs the used dataset with conversations available somewhere? What about the model architecture?
- foamclutching 8y agoThe Grand Challenge, of maintaining a coherent and engaging conversation for 20 minutes, still remains. As does a $1 million unrestricted gift which will be awarded to the winning team’s university, if their socialbot meets this challenge...
- imh 8y agoWeird that a university press release wouldn't make it easy to find actual details for work in question, but a few links deep you can find a paper on the winner: https://s3.amazonaws.com/dex-microsites-prod/alexaprize/2018/papers/Gunrock.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/dex-microsites-prod/alexaprize/2018... > Gunrock: Building A Human-Like Social Bot By Leveraging Large Scale Real User Data Abstract: > Gunrock is a social bot designed to engage users in open domain conversations. We improved our bot iteratively using large scale user interaction data to be more capable and human-like. Our system engaged in over 40, 000 conversations during the semi-finals period of the 2018 Alexa Prize. We developed a context-aware hierarchical dialog manager to handle a wide variety of user behaviors, such as topic switching and question answering. In addition, we designed a robust threestep natural language understanding module, which includes techniques such as sentence segmentation and automatic speech recognition (ASR) error correction. Furthermore, we improve the human-likeness of the system by adding prosodic speech synthesis. As a result of our many contributions and large scale user interactions analysis, we achieved an average score of 3.62 on a 1 − 5 Likert scale on Oct 14th. Additionally, we achieved an average of 22.14 number of turns and a 5.22 minutes conversation duration.