Emory team makes finals in Amazon's Alexa Prize for artificial intelligence

The Emory team is led by faculty advisor Jinho Choi (center) and graduate students James Finch (left) and Sarah Finch.

A team of six Emory computer science students made it to the final round for Amazon’s Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge, a global competition among universities to create a chatbot that advances the field of artificial intelligence. The winner of the 2021 Alexa Prize will be announced in mid-August. At stake is a $500,000 first prize. In addition, $1 million in research funds will be awarded to the winning team if it meets the “grand challenge” criteria, including the ability of its chatbot to engage the judges in conversation for at least 20 minutes. 

 

In addition to Emory, the finalists are Czech Technical University, Prague; SUNY at Buffalo, New York; Stanford University and the University of California Santa Cruz. 

 

The Emory team is headed by graduate students Sarah Finch and James Finch, along with faculty advisor Jinho Choi, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Sciences. Last year, the trio headed a team of 14 Emory students that took first place, winning $500,000 for their chatbot named Emora. They chose the name because it sounds like a feminine version of “Emory” and is similar to a Hebrew word for an eloquent sage. 

This year, they are turning up the heat with an even more advanced version of Emora and new team members, including graduate student Han He and undergraduates Sophy Huang, Daniil Huryn and Mack Hutsell. All the students are members of Choi’s Natural Language Processing Research Laboratory. 

“I’m extremely proud to have such a talented team of students,” Choi says. “It’s a group of strongly motivated people with the right combination of diverse skills coming together at the right time. They’re working on changing the paradigm for conversational artificial intelligence.” 

“We’re using some established technology but taking a groundbreaking approach in how we combine and execute dialogue management so a computer can make logical inferences while conversing with a human,” adds Sarah Finch. “Ultimately, we’re making Emora even more flexible in how she can interact with people.”

Read the full story.

Related:

Emory students win Amazon's 2020 Alexa Prize