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Location: Prague, CZ
Faculty advisor: Jan Šedivý

Alquist (2017)

We are the Alquist team from CTU, Prague, Czech Republic.

By Czech Technical University in Prague
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We are proud of living in the country where the word "robot" was first used in the play called R.U.R. written by Karel Capek. Our team has worked tightly together for more than a year. We love academic research in artificial intelligence as well as cooperating on practical projects with companies. We want to build on top of our greatest accomplishments the question answering system YodaQA and the bot manager Alquist.

Jan P. - Team leader

I finished my bachelor's degree in 2014 in Software Engineering at Faculty of Informatics, Czech Technical University (CTU). The topic of my bachelor thesis was Optical music sheet recognition module. After that, I started my master's degree in Artificial Intelligence and finished in 2016 at Faculty of Electrical Engineering, CTU. The topic of my master thesis was Enhancing Question Answering with Structured Database Queries. Now, I am pursuing my PhD and I am interested in Natural Language Processing. I also work as a researcher in eClub Prague on related projects.

Jakub K.

Finished my undergraduate degree in Cybernetics and Robotics at CTU in 2015. My graduation thesis topic was Analysis of Scaling in Distributed Control under the department of Cybernetics. Started my graduate studies in 2015 at CTU in the department of Control Engineering. Expected to graduate with my master's degree in 2018 and pursue my PhD after graduation. During my graduate studies I was involved in projects concerning automated dialogue systems, specifically a voice activated assistant used for weather forecasting and news information. Lately my work focuses on Alquist Dialogue Manager, a framework for bot creation.

Long Hoang N.

A computer science student in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. Spent 1 year Erasmus in Saarbrucken studying computational linguistics, natural language processing and machine learning. Previously worked on entity linking for a QA system during a summer internship. Currently writing a bachelor's thesis on named entity recognition using recurrent neural networks.

Martin M.

Martin is a graduate student of data science in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. In December 2015 he joined the YodaQA team and worked there on his Bachelor's thesis on "Semantic Parsing of Questions". His current task is managing YodaQA components on a Docker server.

Petr M.

Petr is a student of artificial intelligence in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. He worked on the question answering system YodaQA. His bachelor's thesis was "Dialog system for question answering". He currently works on Alquist dialogue manager for bot creation in the eClub Prague.

Jan Šedivý - Faculty advisor

Jan has, after 18 years experience in the industry, returned to CTU, CIIRC. He teaches at CVUT FEL, he is a director of the CVUT MediaLab Foundation. He has worked at Google (2008-2010) as a Technical Lead Manager and in the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He was a research staff member (1992-2000) and research manager (2000-2008). He has been leading many worldwide research and development projects. He was a principal designer of the IBM Embedded ViaVoce speech recognition application. He holds 19 US patents. His interests are AI, ML, NLU, mobile, internet, cloud computing.

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Czech Technical University in Prague

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