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����������������� students took first place in the 2018 Alexa Prize Finals, beating out teams from universities in Scotland and the Czech Republic in the Amazon-sponsored competition to turn voice assistant Alexa into a better conversationalist, .

Amazon presented a $500,000 prize to be divided equally among the 11 undergraduate and graduate students who comprised the Gunrock team.

Teams in the competition would turn their chatbots over to real-world Alexa users for judging. They would say, “Alexa, let’s chat," then rate the ensuing conversations.

�����������������, Czech Technical University in Prague and Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh made it to the finals. The Gunrock bot earned an average score of 3.1 on a 5-point scale and achieved an average conversation length of 9 minutes, 59 seconds.

Amazon offered an additional $1 million prize for a 20-minute conversation, but no team cracked that barrier.

First-year computer science graduate student Chun-Yen (Arbit) Chen led the , with Zhou Yu, assistant professor of computer science, as faculty adviser. Other students on the team were: Ashwin Bhandare, Antara Bhowmick, Austin Chau, Shreenath Iyer, Kevin Jesse, Giritheja Sreenivasulu, Weiming Wen, Yi Mang Yang, Dian Yu and Mingyang Zhou.

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Aggie basketball keeps it close with Hoosiers

The ��С���������������’ men's basketball team faced off against a powerhouse Big Ten team last week, and led for the majority of the game.

For more than 32 minutes of Friday's (Nov. 23) nonconference game in Bloomington, Indiana, ��С��������������� knocked Indiana on its heels thanks to the Aggies’ trademark defense, ball movement, patience and discipline while on offense. And the crowd of 13,562 never had a chance to relax until a string of three consecutive Hoosier threes gave them a late lead in a game IU won by a 76-62 score.

and watch the video highlights above.

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