Amazon and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) announced today the launch of the Amazon-AILL center on artificial intelligence for interactive conversation experiences (AICE). This center, which will be housed with Grainger College of Engineering, will support UIUC researchers in their development of new approaches to conversation AI systems.
This multi-year collaboration will provide support for research projects that will aim to develop intelligent, déveltoppal systems that demonstrate contextual understanding, emotional intelligence, allow for personalization and are able to interpret non-verbal communication while being ethics and fair.
Furthermore, the center allocates annual scholarships to doctorate students who conduct research in conversation AI, both to help promote the field and also support the next generation of researchers. Fellowship Recuals will be paired with Amazon scientists who will mentor and give them a deposition of the problems in the industry.
UIUC
As part of the collaboration, the university will also host public symposia. These symposia will provide a forum to university researchers to present research, while Amazon scientists can also share scientific progress and discuss future investigative areas.
Aice Center will be led by Heng JI, professor of computer science at UIUC and Amazon Scholar, a leading authority for natural language treatment and language extraction. Heng has focused his academic research on science initiatives at the intersection of natural language understanding and web-scale device resolution and on techniques to accelerate development/skills development.
“We are reviewed to launch this new center that brings together the Amazon and the UIUC faculty and students to jointly promote technologies that are fundamental to the future of conversation AI,” said Rohit Prasad, Alexa Senior Vice President and Head Scientist. “Research progress made by the faculty and students in this center is burning the next generation AI system, which is more context that understands and responds to emotions and is even more natural and human.”
“Research that happens throughout Grainger College of Engineering changes the world around us,” said Rashid Bashir, Dean of Graining College of Engineering. “This agreement on a center between Illinois and Amazon, which focuses on conversation experiences and AI, will improve aspects of technology that affect our day day.”
Amazon and UIUC
The launch of AICE is prior to a rich history of collaboration between Amazon and UIUC. The UIUC Faculty In 2017, UIUC has received the 23 Amazon Research Awards. In October 2021, Amazon, along with four other technology leaders and non-profit, announced his support for the speech-affority project at UIUC, aimed at improving the accuracy and effectiveness of voice recognition algorithms for those with disabilities and various speech patterns.
Amazon also has existing relationships with other UIUC Academic. In addition to Ji, Paris Emeraldis, Professor of Computer Science and Associate Head of the Computer Science Department; and Romit Roy Choudhury, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, are also Amazon Designs from UIUC. EMARAGDIS, currently editor-in-chief of the ACM/IEEE transactions on audio, speech and language processing, has worked with AWS’s’ Chime Team Team August 2021. Choudhury, who heads System and Research Networking Group (SYNRG) has worked with the devices and services organization since March 2022.
Bo Li, assistant professor in computer science; And he Zhao, assistant professor of computer science, both Amazon visits Akademik. Li joined the Amazon Web Services Deep Learning Organization in January 2022, while Zhao took up the search science and AI organization in May 2022.
Teams from UIUC are also currently competing in running Alexa prize challenges. Team Charmbana, advised by Chengxiang Zhai, Donald Biggar Willett professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science, competes in Socialbot Grand Challenge. Team Kingfisher, advised by Julia Hockenmaier, professor of computer science, competes in Simbot Challenge.