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  • NOVA LINCS is among the 10 research labs selected by Amazon for Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2
  • Feb 2023
  • The team led by João Magalhães, NOVA LINCS researcher from Multimodal Systems Group and Professor at the Computer Science Department in NOVA School of Science and Technology | FCT NOVA, is among the 10 teams around the globe selected by Amazon to participate in the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2, a university challenge focused on developing multimodal (voice and vision) conversational agents that assist customers in completing tasks requiring multiple steps and decisions. The team members include Rafael Ferreira (team leader), Diogo Silva, Diogo Tavares, João Bordalo, Inês Simões, Rodrigo Valério, and David Semedo.

    Conversational assistants are constantly pushed to their limits supporting human daily routines. The constant demand to extend the reach of conversational assistants to many activities and tasks exposes the lack of General AI algorithms. Hence, the TWIZ team long-term vision is to move multimodal conversational AI closer to the way humans communicate and solve tasks. To achieve this long-term vision, the team aims to make multimodal conversations human-like, stimulating, and resilient to user ramblings.

    Alexa Prize is a flagship industry-academic collaboration dedicated to accelerating the science of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and multimodal human-AI interactions. “Prize competitions provide an agile science experimentation framework for researchers and students encouraging them to explore transformational ideas at the boundaries of what is achievable,” said Reza Ghanadan, senior principal scientist with Alexa AI and head of Alexa Prize.

    More details here.