Team Wise Macaw
Amazon's Alexa Prize Team From Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

About Amazon Alexa Prize

Amazon has sponsored 12 universisties to compete in the 2016-2017 Prize. The goal of this competition is to build a social bot that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics for 20 minutes.
These 12 universities were chosen from over 100 applicants across 22 countries. Each team receives $100,000 funding for working on the social bot.
The winning team will win $250,000 grand prize!

Meet The Team


Jieming Ji
Computer Science Sophomore at RPI

Qingyun Wang
Computer Science & mathematics Sophomore at RPI

Zev Battad
Cognitive Science PhD Student at RPI


Jingfei Zhou
Computer Science Sophomore Student at RPI

Jiashun Gou
Computer Science Sophomore Student at RPI

Dr. Mei Si
Associate Professor at RPI

Team Vision

We are five graduate and undergraduate students of cognitive science, computer science, and mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Our motivation stems from companionship being a fundamental human desire. Our goal is to build a virtual companion -- an emotionally intelligent bot that can converse with a human. The bot will use its personality, humor, and information obtained from online knowledge resources to engage its human partner on both the emotional and practical levels. Our companion bot will bond with its users and make the user-experience as life-like as possible.