ScottyBot an Alexa Prize SimBot Finalist

A simulated robot developed by students in the Language Technologies Institute has made the final round of Amazon's Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge.

A simulated robot developed by Carnegie Mellon University students in the School of Computer
Science’s Language Technologies Institute (LTI) has made the final round of Amazon’s Alexa
Prize SimBot Challenge.

ScottyBot was one of five bots selected for the final round. The five teams are competing to
develop a bot that best responds to commands and other inputs in a virtual world. Alexa users
with Echo Show or Fire TV devices can interact with ScottyBot and the other finalists by saying
“Alexa, play with robot.” Ratings and feedback provided by the public will help the team
improve their bots ahead of a final competition during the first week of May for awards totaling
$650,000.

This is the inaugural SimBot Challenge. The challenge seeks to advance the science of embodied
artificial intelligence agents that can interact with humans and understand, learn and
collaborate on tasks. Through the challenge, students can launch their work online and receive
rapid feedback from Alexa users.

The ScottyBot team has evolved throughout the competition. The current team is led by
Assistant Professor Yonatan Bisk and includes master’s students Jimin Sun, Benny Jiang, Jessica
Zhong, Malaika Vijay, Nikhil Gupta, Prasoon Varshney, Sai Vishwas Padigi, Shubham Virmani,
Shubham Phal, Vineeth Reddy, Xinyue Chen, Adhokshaja Madhwaraj, Kushagra Mahajan, and
So Yeon (Tiffany) Min.

More information about the SimBot Challenge is available on Amazon’s Science blog.