Alexa Prize Proceedings

The Alexa Prize Proceedings publishes the research in conversational AI from the competition. Amazon works closely with university teams to provide a testbed for research to address the challenges with dialog management, natural language understanding, contextual modeling, commonsense reasoning and response generation, and these proceedings seek to capture the advances in those areas that result from these efforts. Authors are free to make additional hardcopy publishing arrangements, but Amazon will not produce hardcopies of these volumes.
12 results found
  • University of Glasgow
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    We present GRILLBot, a multi-modal task-oriented voice assistant to guide users through complex real-world tasks for the Alexa TaskBot Challenge. An effective TaskBot has to guide a user through a long and complex task, be engaging, and help solve problems along the way. GRILLBot achieves this in the domains of cooking and home improvement by helping search over a large task corpus with mixed- initiative
  • Carnegie Mellon University
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    Tartan is a multi-domain task-oriented bot that assists users with two different tasks: 1. cooking with recipes from Whole Foods and 2. doing projects from WikiHow. The bot’s system is divided into two stages. In the first stage, the bot assists the user in identifying a task that they want to do. In the second stage, the bot guides the users through sequences of step-by-step instructions. We developed
  • University of Pennsylvania
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    We describe QuakerBot, a dialog system that helps users with household tasks and a participant in the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge. QuakerBot can process a variety of user requests, search for instructions from web resources such as wikiHow or Whole Foods Market recipes, answer related questions, and so on. Its components simultaneously consist of large language models with an impressive few-shot performance
  • Texas A&M University
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    In this paper, we present Howdy Y’all, a multi-modal task-oriented dialogue agent developed for the 2021-2022 Alexa Prize TaskBot competition. Our design principles guiding Howdy Y’all aim for high user satisfaction through friendly and trustworthy encounters, minimization of negative conversation edge cases, and wide coverage over many tasks. Hence, Howdy Y’all is built upon a rapid prototyping platform
  • National Taiwan University
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    This paper introduces Miutsu, National Taiwan University’s Alexa Prize TaskBot, which is designed to assist users in completing tasks requiring multiple steps and decisions in two different domains – home improvement and cooking. We overview our system design and architectural goals, and detail the proposed core elements, including question answering, task retrieval, social chatting, and various conversational
  • Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    We present TacoBot, a task-oriented dialogue system built for the inaugural Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, which assists users in completing multi-step cooking and home improvement tasks. TacoBot is designed with a user-centered principle and aspires to deliver a collaborative and accessible dialogue experience. Towards that end, it is equipped with accurate language understanding, flexible dialogue management
  • NOVA University Lisbon
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    This paper describes the vision, scientific contributions, and technical details of the Task Wizard (TWIZ) team’s participation in the Alexa TaskBot Challenge 2021. Our bot design envisions the support of an engaging experience, where users are guided through multimodal conversations, towards the successful completion of the selected task. This is achieved through four key principles: a) robust dialog interaction
  • University College London
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a long-standing area of exploration in the research community and has now penetrated both academia and industries with products such as Siri and Alexa. In this work, we present COoking-aNd-DIy-TAsk-based (Condita) ChatBot, a task-oriented dialogue system, for the 2021 Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge. Condita provides an engaging multi-modal agent that assists
  • University of Massachusetts Amherst
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    We present Maruna Bot, a Task-Oriented Dialogue System (TODS) that assists people in cooking or Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tasks using either a speech-only or multimodal (speech and screen) interface. Building such a system is challenging, because it touches many research areas including language understanding, text generation, task planning, dialogue state tracking, question answering, multi-modal retrieval,
  • University of California, Santa Barbara
    Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 1 Proceedings
    2022
    In this paper, we introduce Gauchobot, a task-oriented dialogue system developed for the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge. We identified two main obstacles to building better conversational AI assistants in real-world applications. The first is great human efforts needed in data annotation and engineering a dialogue system that provides service in a new domain from scratch. The high cost, often ignored by

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The latest updates, stories, and more about Alexa Prize.
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning background, to build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-modal systems. You will support projects that work on technologies including multi-modal model alignment, moderation systems and evaluation. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will support the development of novel algorithms and modeling techniques, to advance the state of the art with LLMs. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of speech and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). You are also expected to publish in top tier conferences. About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope in LLMs and multimodal systems. Specifically, we focus on model alignment with an aim to maintain safety while not denting utility, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
IN, HR, Gurugram
Our customers have immense faith in our ability to deliver packages timely and as expected. A well planned network seamlessly scales to handle millions of package movements a day. It has monitoring mechanisms that detect failures before they even happen (such as predicting network congestion, operations breakdown), and perform proactive corrective actions. When failures do happen, it has inbuilt redundancies to mitigate impact (such as determine other routes or service providers that can handle the extra load), and avoids relying on single points of failure (service provider, node, or arc). Finally, it is cost optimal, so that customers can be passed the benefit from an efficiently set up network. Amazon Shipping is hiring Applied Scientists to help improve our ability to plan and execute package movements. As an Applied Scientist in Amazon Shipping, you will work on multiple challenging machine learning problems spread across a wide spectrum of business problems. You will build ML models to help our transportation cost auditing platforms effectively audit off-manifest (discrepancies between planned and actual shipping cost). You will build models to improve the quality of financial and planning data by accurately predicting ship cost at a package level. Your models will help forecast the packages required to be pick from shipper warehouses to reduce First Mile shipping cost. Using signals from within the transportation network (such as network load, and velocity of movements derived from package scan events) and outside (such as weather signals), you will build models that predict delivery delay for every package. These models will help improve buyer experience by triggering early corrective actions, and generating proactive customer notifications. Your role will require you to demonstrate Think Big and Invent and Simplify, by refining and translating Transportation domain-related business problems into one or more Machine Learning problems. You will use techniques from a wide array of machine learning paradigms, such as supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised and reinforcement learning. Your model choices will include, but not be limited to, linear/logistic models, tree based models, deep learning models, ensemble models, and Q-learning models. You will use techniques such as LIME and SHAP to make your models interpretable for your customers. You will employ a family of reusable modelling solutions to ensure that your ML solution scales across multiple regions (such as North America, Europe, Asia) and package movement types (such as small parcel movements and truck movements). You will partner with Applied Scientists and Research Scientists from other teams in US and India working on related business domains. Your models are expected to be of production quality, and will be directly used in production services. You will work as part of a diverse data science and engineering team comprising of other Applied Scientists, Software Development Engineers and Business Intelligence Engineers. You will participate in the Amazon ML community by authoring scientific papers and submitting them to Machine Learning conferences. You will mentor Applied Scientists and Software Development Engineers having a strong interest in ML. You will also be called upon to provide ML consultation outside your team for other problem statements. If you are excited by this charter, come join us!
IN, HR, Gurugram
We're on a journey to build something new a green field project! Come join our team and build new discovery and shopping products that connect customers with their vehicle of choice. We're looking for a talented Senior Applied Scientist to join our team of product managers, designers, and engineers to design, and build innovative automotive-shopping experiences for our customers. This is a great opportunity for an experienced engineer to design and implement the technology for a new Amazon business. We are looking for a Applied Scientist to design, implement and deliver end-to-end solutions. We are seeking passionate, hands-on, experienced and seasoned Senior Applied Scientist who will be deep in code and algorithms; who are technically strong in building scalable computer vision machine learning systems across item understanding, pose estimation, class imbalanced classifiers, identification and segmentation.. You will drive ideas to products using paradigms such as deep learning, semi supervised learning and dynamic learning. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will also help lead and mentor our team of applied scientists and engineers. You will take on complex customer problems, distill customer requirements, and then deliver solutions that either leverage existing academic and industrial research or utilize your own out-of-the-box but pragmatic thinking. In addition to coming up with novel solutions and prototypes, you will directly contribute to implementation while you lead. A successful candidate has excellent technical depth, scientific vision, project management skills, great communication skills, and a drive to achieve results in a unified team environment. You should enjoy the process of solving real-world problems that, quite frankly, haven’t been solved at scale anywhere before. Along the way, we guarantee you’ll get opportunities to be a bold disruptor, prolific innovator, and a reputed problem solver—someone who truly enables AI and robotics to significantly impact the lives of millions of consumers. Key job responsibilities Architect, design, and implement Machine Learning models for vision systems on robotic platforms Optimize, deploy, and support at scale ML models on the edge. Influence the team's strategy and contribute to long-term vision and roadmap. Work with stakeholders across , science, and operations teams to iterate on design and implementation. Maintain high standards by participating in reviews, designing for fault tolerance and operational excellence, and creating mechanisms for continuous improvement. Prototype and test concepts or features, both through simulation and emulators and with live robotic equipment Work directly with customers and partners to test prototypes and incorporate feedback Mentor other engineer team members. A day in the life - 6+ years of building machine learning models for retail application experience - PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience - Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language - Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning - Demonstrated expertise in computer vision and machine learning techniques.
US, WA, Seattle
Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and programming from Prime Video add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store, and can enjoy even more content for free with ads. Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. As a Prime Video team member, you’ll have end-to-end ownership of the product, user experience, design, and technology required to deliver state-of-the-art experiences for our customers. You’ll get to work on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and varied. You’ll also be able to experiment with new possibilities, take risks, and collaborate with remarkable people. We’ll look for you to bring your diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. With global opportunities for talented technologists, you can decide where a career Prime Video Tech takes you! Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist in the Content Understanding Team, you will lead the end-to-end research and deployment of video and multi-modal models applied to a variety of downstream applications. More specifically, you will: - Work backwards from customer problems to research and design scientific approaches for solving them - Work closely with other scientists, engineers and product managers to expand the depth of our product insights with data, create a variety of experiments to determine the high impact projects to include in planning roadmaps - Stay up-to-date with advancements and the latest modeling techniques in the field - Publish your research findings in top conferences and journals About the team Our Prime Video Content Understanding team builds holistic media representations (e.g. descriptions of scenes, semantic embeddings) and apply them to new customer experiences supply chain problems. Our technology spans the entire Prime Video catalogue globally, and we enable instant recaps, skip intro timing, ad placement, search, and content moderation.
US, WA, Seattle
Do you want to re-invent how millions of people consume video content on their TVs, Tablets and Alexa? We are building a free to watch streaming service called Fire TV Channels (https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/21/amazon-launches-fire-tv-channels-app-400-fast-channels/). Our goal is to provide customers with a delightful and personalized experience for consuming content across News, Sports, Cooking, Gaming, Entertainment, Lifestyle and more. You will work closely with engineering and product stakeholders to realize our ambitious product vision. You will get to work with Generative AI and other state of the art technologies to help build personalization and recommendation solutions from the ground up. You will be in the driver's seat to present customers with content they will love. Using Amazon’s large-scale computing resources, you will ask research questions about customer behavior, build state-of-the-art models to generate recommendations and run these models to enhance the customer experience. You will participate in the Amazon ML community and mentor Applied Scientists and Software Engineers with a strong interest in and knowledge of ML. Your work will directly benefit customers and you will measure the impact using scientific tools.
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Senior Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning background, to build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Key job responsibilities As a Senior Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will work with talented peers to lead the development of novel algorithms and modeling techniques, to advance the state of the art with LLMs. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of speech and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope in LLMs and multimodal systems, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
The Amazon Alexa AI team in India is seeking a talented, self-driven Applied Scientist to work on prototyping, optimizing, and deploying ML algorithms within the realm of Generative AI. Key responsibilities include: - Research, experiment and build Proof Of Concepts advancing the state of the art in AI & ML for GenAI. - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to architect and execute technically rigorous AI projects. - Thrive in dynamic environments, adapting quickly to evolving technical requirements and deadlines. - Engage in effective technical communication (written & spoken) with coordination across teams. - Conduct thorough documentation of algorithms, methodologies, and findings for transparency and reproducibility. - Publish research papers in internal and external venues of repute - Support on-call activities for critical issues Basic Qualifications: - Master’s or PhD in computer science, statistics or a related field or relevant science experience (publications/scientific prototypes) in lieu of Masters - Experience in deep learning, machine learning, and data science. - Proficiency in coding and software development, with a strong focus on machine learning frameworks. - Experience in Python, or another language; command line usage; familiarity with Linux and AWS ecosystems. - Understanding of relevant statistical measures such as confidence intervals, significance of error measurements, development and evaluation data sets, etc. - Excellent communication skills (written & spoken) and ability to collaborate effectively in a distributed, cross-functional team setting. Preferred Qualifications: - Track record of diving into data to discover hidden patterns and conducting error/deviation analysis - Ability to develop experimental and analytic plans for data modeling processes, use of strong baselines, ability to accurately determine cause and effect relations - The motivation to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. - Exceptional level of organization and strong attention to detail - Comfortable working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment - Papers published in AI/ML venues of repute
IN, KA, Bengaluru
The Amazon Alexa AI team in India is seeking a talented, self-driven Applied Scientist to work on prototyping, optimizing, and deploying ML algorithms within the realm of Generative AI. Key responsibilities include: - Research, experiment and build Proof Of Concepts advancing the state of the art in AI & ML for GenAI. - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to architect and execute technically rigorous AI projects. - Thrive in dynamic environments, adapting quickly to evolving technical requirements and deadlines. - Engage in effective technical communication (written & spoken) with coordination across teams. - Conduct thorough documentation of algorithms, methodologies, and findings for transparency and reproducibility. - Publish research papers in internal and external venues of repute - Support on-call activities for critical issues Basic Qualifications: - Master’s or PhD in computer science, statistics or a related field - 2-7 years experience in deep learning, machine learning, and data science. - Proficiency in coding and software development, with a strong focus on machine learning frameworks. - Experience in Python, or another language; command line usage; familiarity with Linux and AWS ecosystems. - Understanding of relevant statistical measures such as confidence intervals, significance of error measurements, development and evaluation data sets, etc. - Excellent communication skills (written & spoken) and ability to collaborate effectively in a distributed, cross-functional team setting. - Papers published in AI/ML venues of repute Preferred Qualifications: - Track record of diving into data to discover hidden patterns and conducting error/deviation analysis - Ability to develop experimental and analytic plans for data modeling processes, use of strong baselines, ability to accurately determine cause and effect relations - The motivation to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. - Exceptional level of organization and strong attention to detail - Comfortable working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment
US, WA, Bellevue
Our mission is to provide consistent, accurate, and relevant delivery information to every single page on every Amazon-owned site. MILLIONS of customers will be impacted by your contributions: The changes we make directly impact the customer experience on every Amazon site. This is a great position for someone who likes to leverage Machine learning technologies to solve the real customer problems, and also wants to see and measure their direct impact on customers. We are a cross-functional team that owns the ENTIRE delivery experience for customers: From the business requirements to the technical systems that allow us to directly affect the on-site experience from a central service, business and technical team members are integrated so everyone is involved through the entire development process. You will have a chance to develop the state-of-art machine learning, including deep learning and reinforcement learning models, to build targeting, recommendation, and optimization services to impact millions of Amazon customers. Do you want to join an innovative team of scientists and engineers who use machine learning and statistical techniques to deliver the best delivery experience on every Amazon-owned site? Are you excited by the prospect of analyzing and modeling terabytes of data on the cloud and create state-of-art algorithms to solve real world problems? Do you like to own end-to-end business problems/metrics and directly impact the profitability of the company? Do you like to innovate and simplify? If yes, then you may be a great fit to join the DEX AI team. Key job responsibilities - Research and implement machine learning techniques to create scalable and effective models in Delivery Experience (DEX) systems - Solve business problems and identify business opportunities to provide the best delivery experience on all Amazon-owned sites. - Design and develop highly innovative machine learning and deep learning models for big data. - Build state-of-art ranking and recommendations models and apply to Amazon search engine. - Analyze and understand large amounts of Amazon’s historical business data to detect patterns, to analyze trends and to identify correlations and causalities - Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model implementation
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Amazon is investing heavily in building a world class advertising business and we are responsible for defining and delivering a collection of self-service performance advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our products are strategically important to our Retail and Marketplace businesses driving long term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks daily and are breaking fresh ground to create world-class products. We are highly motivated, collaborative and fun-loving with an entrepreneurial spirit and bias for action. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate, we are growing at an unprecedented rate with a seemingly endless range of new opportunities. The ATT team, based in Bangalore, is responsible for ensuring that ads are relevant and is of good quality, leading to higher conversion for the sellers and providing a great experience for the customers. We deal with one of the world’s largest product catalog, handle billions of requests a day with plans to grow it by order of magnitude and use automated systems to validate tens of millions of offers submitted by thousands of merchants in multiple countries and languages. In this role, you will build and develop ML models to address content understanding problems in Ads. These models will rely on a variety of visual and textual features requiring expertise in both domains. These models need to scale to multiple languages and countries. You will collaborate with engineers and other scientists to build, train and deploy these models. As part of these activities, you will develop production level code that enables moderation of millions of ads submitted each day.