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Artificial intelligence researchers invited to take the Allen AI Science Challenge

AI2 logoPaul G. Allen, founder of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), aims to spur the development of artificial intelligence that can understand and answer general questions about the world. Today, AI2 CEO (and UW CSE professor) Oren Etzioni announced the creation of the Allen AI Science Challenge – inviting academic and industry researchers to demonstrate that their AI system can outperform all others on an 8th grade multiple choice science test.

“IBM has announced that Watson is ‘going to college’ and ‘diagnosing patients’…But before college and medical school — let’s make sure Watson can ace the 8 th grade science test. We challenge Watson, and all other interested parties — take the Allen AI Science Challenge,” Etzioni said in the press release announcing the competition.

The institute has partnered with Kaggle, an online community of data scientists that holds competitions to encourage the solution of complex data science problems, to administer the challenge. In addition to gaining serious cred in the computing community, competitors have a shot at a top prize of $50,000 for the AI system that answers the most questions correctly, with second and third prizes of $20,000 and $10,000, respectively. AI2 will announce the winners next February at the AAAI 2016 conference in Phoenix, Arizona.

Learn more and enter the competition here. Read the GeekWire article about the announcement here. Check out the recent breakthrough in AI research by AI2 and UW – which tested an AI system’s ability to solve SAT math questions – here.