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The Alexa Prize

129 pointsby nburgerover 8 years ago

14 comments

iandanforthover 8 years ago
Amazon is notorious for this kind of challenge. They offer tiny rewards for huge breakthroughs and then they own any IP submitted. The picking challenge is like this.<p>&quot;Each Entrant hereby grants Sponsor and its affiliates a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, and royalty-free license to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, import, export, license, exploit, promote, reproduce, make available, publicly display, publicly perform, create derivative works of, and otherwise exercise all intellectual property and other rights in and to any concepts, works, inventions, information, designs, programs, or software that Entrant or his or her Entrant Team develop or submit in connection with the Competition or the creation of the Socialbot,&quot;<p>Don&#x27;t let your talented friends throw their IP into this pit!
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espadrineover 8 years ago
I applaud Amazon for the offer. That being said…<p>&gt; <i>Amazon will award the winning team $500,000.</i><p>This is hugely under-paid for a worthy winner. AI startups are sold way more these days; Amazon would benefit tremendously from a novel technique in that domain.<p>&gt; <i>Additionally, a prize of $1 million will be awarded to the winning team’s university if their socialbot achieves the grand challenge of conversing coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics for 20 minutes.</i><p>This emphasizes further how much those students would be ripped off. Their success is valued at half that of their university, even though they are already paying heavily for that university.<p>More to the point, a bot that fits this description is a major achievement, beyond Siri and Cortana — which both have a much, much larger value than a million dollars.<p>I understand that the point is to convince universities to grant their students more time to work on that project, and universities tend not to care about pocket money. However, this ⅓ &#x2F; ⅔ cut is unbalanced.
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sigmarover 8 years ago
The intellectual property section towards the end of the rules[1] seems noteworthy (though not unexpected).<p>&gt;Each Entrant hereby grants Sponsor and its affiliates a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, and royalty-free license to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, import, export, license, exploit, promote, reproduce, make available, publicly display, publicly perform, create derivative works of, and otherwise exercise all intellectual property and other rights in and to any concepts, works, inventions, information, designs, programs, or software that Entrant or his or her Entrant Team develop or submit in connection with the Competition or the creation of the Socialbot, including any of the foregoing included or described in any Technical Article or other materials provided to Sponsor.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.amazon.com&#x2F;alexaprize&#x2F;contest-rules" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.amazon.com&#x2F;alexaprize&#x2F;contest-rules</a>
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TYover 8 years ago
I&#x27;m curious why only students can apply? Why not allow individual developers or companies as well?
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CGamesPlayover 8 years ago
Is it just me, or does 1 month seem like a really short time frame for the initial invocation of this contest? Why couldn&#x27;t they set the deadline farther back?
partycoderover 8 years ago
If you possess this technology, you can sell yourself to either Amazon, Google or Microsoft for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.<p>2.5 million dollars for such capability is by far the most abusive prize ever.<p>If you have seen &quot;Pirates of Silicon Valley&quot;, you would be the equivalent of the guy that sold DOS to Microsoft for $50,000.
notyourworkover 8 years ago
I think this program is great and similarly reminds me of Google Summer of Code. The biggest deficiency I see with new engineers is lack of real experience. GSOC, this Amazon program, these give students the chance to build a real thing that does something. Too many students come out of school with their theoretical assignments completed, and basic hello world programs.<p>I hope Amazon receives great submissions from this!
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ChartsNGraffsover 8 years ago
I didn&#x27;t know the Turing Test was renamed to Alexa Prize
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perryh2over 8 years ago
It&#x27;d be cool if someone built a bot that would help you practice another language. I spent years learning Spanish but don&#x27;t have a partner to speak to in the language.
alexmlamb2over 8 years ago
Everyone is complaining that the prize is very small relative to the value of a successful dialog startup.<p>But I don&#x27;t see what&#x27;s bad about this. Amazon is open about how small the prize and presumably that will mean that anyone who has a shot at making a dialog startup won&#x27;t participate.<p>So Amazon will probably get a lot of entries from groups that are sort of borderline, which isn&#x27;t necessarily the worst thing in the world.
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ge96over 8 years ago
Limited to students only?
mkageniusover 8 years ago
I guess they wont be sharing the dataset of actual alexa searches so far.
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pamelabuckover 8 years ago
Come on, $500K is a pittance to the winner which could create a compelling new use case for Alexa. Amzn, you can do better and dont be penny wise, pound foolish
mintplantover 8 years ago
They keep using the word &quot;socialbot&quot;. I&#x27;ve read through the FAQ and I still only have a vague idea of what they have in mind.