
Student Team Wins Amazon Alexa Artificial Intelligence Challenge - 11thEarlOfMar
https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/student-team-wins-amazon-alexa-artificial-intelligence-challenge/
======
eBombzor
Just 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
The 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-...](https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/9f406f35-c997-4d17-a6ac-89a35f69b661/announcing-
the-2018-alexa-prize-participants)

~~~
ppod
>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
Just because something is open source doesn't mean the IP is granted to
everyone.

------
B-Con
Glad 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.

~~~
ecocentrik
Each 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
I 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.

~~~
ecocentrik
I hope I'm not projecting a distrust of simulacrum. I distrust other humans,
not our tools. But I'm not oblivious to my bubble and people outside it that
have no idea how these tools work or how others might use them to their
direct/indirect disadvantage. People create stories to explain their losses
and sometimes blame tools.

I understand the uncanny valley as a product of a pattern matching exercise
that humans developed well before we encountered AI. A part of our "friend or
foe", "like me or unlike me" mechanism. If a user considers the tool a
"potential foe" (for instance, a customer service resolution bot) every
shallow attempt by the tool to approximate "friend" could further alienating
the user. I don't think the "weird feeling" just goes away at that point.

I'm also pretty sure that we're going to be in the uncanny valley for long
enough to make use of that "weird feeling" for effect outside of fiction.

------
imh
Weird 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...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/dex-microsites-
prod/alexaprize/2018/papers/Gunrock.pdf)

> 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.

------
bengotow
Does 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.

------
adamnemecek
Czech Technical University number 2!

The teams site [http://alquistai.com](http://alquistai.com)

------
abhishek0318
Prof. 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
Is the used dataset with conversations available somewhere? What about the
model architecture?

------
catchmeifyoucan
You can test a few of these by saying "Alexa, talk to me"

------
dmckeon
So, 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?

------
foamclutching
The 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...

------
fuddle
It would be nice to see more details on the method they used.

------
saltedonion
Have they made the architecture of this bot public ?

