Alexa & Friends features Yoelle Maarek, vice president of research and science, Alexa Shopping

Amazon recently announced that it is launching a new Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, in which university teams will compete to develop agents that assist customers in completing tasks requiring multiple steps and decisions.

The new challenge will be conducted in parallel with the existing Socialbot Grand Challenge 4, an annual competition that engages university teams in creating socialbots that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans for 20 minutes on a range of topics. On March 25, Yoelle Maarek, vice president of research and science for Alexa Shopping, joined Alexa & Friends to talk more about the new challenge. Watch the replay of the live interview to learn more about the inspiration behind this new Alexa Prize competition.

Maarek earned her PhD in computer science at the Technion in Israel and an engineering degree from Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, France. She has played a pioneering role in researching the fields of information retrieval — the computer science discipline behind search — web search, and data mining. She is an ACM Fellow, and a member of the Technion Board of Governors and management council, and was recently elected member of the National Academy of Engineering.