July 11, 2023
A team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information (SCI) has advanced to the semifinal round of Amazon’s Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2, an international competition to design ethical and inclusive artificial intelligence (AI). This year’s competition challenged teams around the world to develop enhanced functionality for virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa when completing more sophisticated tasks that require multiple steps and decisions. Amazon describes this year’s installment of the competition as “the first conversational AI challenge to incorporate multimodal (voice and vision) customer experiences.”
Competing teams are challenged to propose novel ways to incorporate visual aids into each moment of a conversation with a virtual assistant during which a screen is available. Participants received a $250,000 research grant, access to Alexa team support, Amazon Web Services cloud computing services, Alexa-enabled devices, and other data resources to aid them in completing the challenge.
The team’s name, ISABEL, stands for “IncluSive And collaBorativE aLexa.” The team consists of team leader Anthony Sicilia, Yuya Asano, Kate Atwell, Qi Cheng, Sabit Hassan, Mert Inan, Jennifer Nwogu, and Paras Sharma, and is guided by faculty mentor Dr. Malihe Alikhani of SCI’s Department of Computer Science. Alikhani said, “Language technologies are the lighthouses in the sea of knowledge. We work towards democratizing information access and illuminating the path for those users we have inadvertently left behind. Our robust and inclusive dialogue system can interact with users from different demographics and with different communication preferences. In this landscape, every interaction matters.”
Dr. Adam J. Lee, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Associate Dean for Academic Programs within SCI, said, “This is truly exciting research that helps bring the power of voice assistants to populations who are typically underserved by these technologies. Sharing office space with this team has provided me with a front-row seat to their constant and energetic collaboration throughout this project, and shows what is possible when a diverse set of researchers set their minds on a difficult problem.”
The semifinals for the competition will last from Tuesday, June 13 to Friday, July 28. The top two teams with the highest Semifinals Interaction Rating Average will advance to the final round of the competition. The top teams will receive prize money to be divided among their student members: $500,000 for first place, $100,000 for second, and $50,000 for third.
Alikhani can be found on a number of social media platforms. Alikhani’s Twitter handle is @malihealikhani. Her Instagram handle is malihe__93. She can also be found here on LinkedIn and here on Facebook.
Members of the team can also be found on Twitter. Yuya Asano’s handle is @YuyaAsano47. Paras Sharma can be found at @ParasSharma2809. Dipunj Gupta’s handle is @dipunj. Sabit Hassan’s username is @Sabit_H64.
--Daniel Beresheim
