Amazon recently announced that a team of students from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University has been selected as one of 10 university teams to participate in the 2021 Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge. The competition is the first conversational artificial intelligence (AI) challenge to incorporate multimodal (voice and vision) customer experiences.
Each participating team will receive a $250,000 research grant to develop a new TaskBot, which is a conversational agent that assists customers complete cooking and “do-it-yourself” tasks that require multiple steps and decisions. The yearlong competition will begin in September and conclude in May 2022, with the winners being announced in June. The winning team will receive a $500,000 prize.
The Texas A&M team, led by Dr. James Caverlee, professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, is composed of six students, three undergraduate and three doctoral.
“This is an amazing opportunity for Texas A&M computer science and engineering students to compete on a global stage,” said Caverlee. “We have an exciting plan that brings together research advances in artificial intelligence, natural language understanding and machine learning.”
In order to be successful, the teams will have to address several difficult AI challenges from knowledge representation and inference, and common sense and causal reasoning, to language understanding and generation, which requires the fusion of several AI techniques.
“The vision for our TaskBot, called Howdy Y’all, is an expert task-oriented platform that is both wide (providing high coverage of tasks) and deep (providing high confidence in the tasks that it does cover),” said Caverlee. “Inspired by the official greeting of Texas A&M ("Howdy"), our TaskBot is designed to embody this fundamental friendliness so users feel satisfaction, trust and a core value of respect.”
The other universities that will be competing in the challenge are Carnegie Mellon University, National Taiwan University, NOVA School of Science and Technology, The Ohio State University, the University College London, University of Glasgow, University of Massachusetts and University of Pennsylvania.