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Czech Technical University - Alquist.jpg
Location: Prague, Czech Republic
Faculty advisor: Jan Šedivý

Alquist (2021)

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.

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 4 years. We love academic research in artificial intelligence as well as cooperating on practical projects with companies. We would like to build on our existing accomplishments and push the possibilities of conversational AI forward.

Jakub K. - Team Leader

Jakub finished his bachelor’s degree in Cybernetics and Robotics at Czech Technical University in 2015, graduation thesis topic Analysis of Scaling in Distributed Control, under the Department of Cybernetics. He finished his master's degree in January 2018 with a thesis on Transfer Learning in Automated Question Answering. He co-created a voice-activated assistant for weather forecast and news information, as well as the Alquist Dialogue Manager, a framework for bot creation. From 2017 to 2020, he worked on the bot Alquist for Amazon’s Alexa Prize. He continues to work on conversational AI during his PhD.

Petr M.

Petr is a PhD student of artificial intelligence at Czech Technical University in Prague. His primary focus is conversational AI and dialogue management. He was developing the socialbot Alquist during the Alexa Prize 2017, 2018 and Socialbot Grand Challenge 3. He was interning at Lab126 as an Applied Scientist in summer 2019 and 2020. He likes to work on various projects, about which he writes a blog. He also volunteers as a scoutmaster.

Petr L.

Petr has been focusing on Natural Language Processing for several years. The main interest of his PhD is in text classification with a focus on conversational AI. He got his master's degree from the Faculty of Information technology in Machine learning. During his studies, he spent one semester at the National Taipei University of Technology as an exchange student to improve his English skills. He also likes to attend conferences on AI, frequently as a volunteer.

Van Duy T.

Van Duy finished his bachelor's degree in Informatics and Computer science at the FEE CTU in 2018. The topic of his bachelor's thesis was Entity Linking and Disambiguation Using a Dialogue where he gained interest in NLP. At the moment he is pursuing his master's degree in Data Science major. During his studies, he spent one semester at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Moreover, he also experienced short-term computer science courses at the Gdansk University of Technology in Poland, the Polytechnic University of Madrid in Spain and KU Leuven in Belgium.

Ondrej K.

Ondrej finished his bachelor's degree at CTU FEE with a thesis on extending a testing application for automotive mainly by an interpreted programming language based on UPPAAL. After that, he started his master's degree in Artificial Intelligence at FEE CTU and spent his first year at KU Leuven on Erasmus, where he gained interest in NLP. He is currently in the last year of his Master studies and is working on his thesis related to Natural Language Generation.

Jan Šedivý - Faculty advisor

Jan Šedivý has, after 18 years of experience in the industry, returned to CTU, CIIRC. Currently, to lead the NLP group at CTU. The NLP team developed a social bot, Alquist, placing second twice in a row in the Amazon Alexa Prize. He has worked at Google (2008-2010) as a Technical Lead Manager. He was a research staff member and research manager IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (1992-2008). He has been leading many worldwide research and development projects. He holds 19 US patents. His interests are AI, ML, NLP, Conversational AI.

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