More students to get shot in arm with Amazon Alexa Fellowship – AI

Amazon Alexa FellowshipFrom 4 universities making the cut for the Amazon Alexa Fellowship in 2017 to selecting 18 universities from around the world for their 2018-2019, Amazon is expanding its global outreach to build & secure the future of conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, education & entrepreneurship.

“This decision only establishes our belief in the potential of university students & may bolster them to invent the next big thing”, Amazon said in a statement.

The e-commerce & Cloud computing company reiterated its support to the academic community which, through its research, may boost advance voice technology. Alexa Fund Fellowship was introduced last year to support researchers at top universities focused on speech & language technologies. Since this attempt was met with success & generated interest among other universities, it only exhorted them to grow the program this year as the Alexa Fellowship. However, the fellowship for this year is tailored to directly support 2 distinct groups of students with the Alexa Graduate Fellowship & the Alexa Innovation Fellowship.

About Alexa Graduate Fellowship (2018-2019)

  • Fosters research & education by supporting PhD & post-doctoral students specializing in conversational AI
  • Graduate Fellowships include funding to cover tuition, competitive stipend & mentoring from an Alexa scientist
  • Amazon provides Alexa devices to each university for use in coursework leveraging Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) & Alexa Voice Services (AVS) for students to learn about voice technology through hands-on projects & labs

The universities selected to receive Alexa Graduate Fellowship, criteria including research interests, planned coursework & existing conversational AI curriculum, are:

  1. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
  2. International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India
  3. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
  4. MIT App Inventor, Boston, MA
  5. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
  6. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom
  7. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
  8. University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
  9. University of Washington, Seattle, WA
  10. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Alexa Innovation Fellowship (2018-2019). Key takeaways:

  • Empowers entrepreneurship center faculty to serve as expert resources in voice interfaces on their campus
  • Innovation Fellows receive funding, Alexa devices, hardware kits & regular training
  • Funding & devices are intended to help support student startups in pursuit of integrating voice with their technology using Alexa’s developer services, ASK & AVS
  • The training opportunities will help demonstrate the art-of-the-possible with voice by introducing Innovation Fellows to successful Alexa Fund-backed entrepreneurs & providing them with resources for their students

Based on the criteria including their technology entrepreneurship curriculum, student access to grant funding & experience with Alexa, Amazon selected 10 universities for the Innovation Fellowship.

  1. Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
  2. California State University, Northridge, CA
  3. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
  4. Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
  5. Emerson College, Boston, MA
  6. Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
  7. University of California, Berkeley, CA
  8. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL
  9. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
  10. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA

The work & profiles of Alexa Fellows will be available on the Website blog, those interested can sign up for notifications & for information about any future call for proposals for the 2019-2020 Alexa Fellowship class.

Raising the Voice
The e-commerce giant iterated its support to entrepreneurs in building voice interfaces into their technologies. The launch of ASK, AVS & the allocation US $200 million to promising startups innovating with voice via the Alexa Fund, reaffirms the company’s attempt to get smart people outside of the company to get involved with conversational AI.

Source & Image Credit: Amazon Blog

 

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