Virginia Tech team selected for the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2 to advance task-oriented conversational artificial intelligence

Ismini Lourentzou (fourth from left) and her team of five computer science Ph.D. students at the Sanghani Center attended a boot camp at Amazon headquarters in Seattle to launch the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2. The students are (from left) Makanjuola Ogunleye, Muntasir Wahed, Afrina Tabassum, Ismini Lourentzou, Amarachi Mbakwe, and Tianjiao “Joey” Yu.

A Virginia Tech team of  five computer science Ph.D. students at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics is one of 10 university teams selected internationally to compete in the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2. The team will design multimodal task-oriented conversational assistants that help customers complete complex multistep tasks while adapting to resources and tools available to the user, such as ingredients or equipment. Read more here.