Call for Workshop Sponsors

Dear Potential Sponsor,

We are writing to seek sponsorship from your organization for the Ninth Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC9), which will be held in conjunction with the conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21). Due to the worldwide pandemic situation DSTC9 will be held as a two-day virtual workshop. The DSTC has been a premier research competition for Dialog Systems since its inception in 2013. DSTC9 constitutes of four tracks:

1. Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access – organized by Amazon Alexa AI

2. Multi-domain Task-oriented Dialog Challenge II – organized by Microsoft and Tsinghua University

3. Interactive Evaluation of Dialog – organized by Carnegie Mellon University and University of Southern California

4. SIMMC: Situated Interactive Multi-Modal Conversational AI – organized by Facebook.

More than 150 teams from top companies and universities registered for DSTC9 and 27 papers have been accepted to present at the workshop.

We will have a two-day wrap-up workshop to review the state-of-the-art performances and novel approaches on the DSTC9 tasks and discuss the next directions for dialog technology challenges. The technical papers on the top entries in the DSTC9 will be presented along with the keynote speeches from top researchers in dialog systems at the wrap-up workshop.

The funds collected from the sponsorships will be used towards the costs such as honorariums for invited speakers and supporting student participants. In exchange for your support, we will provide the opportunity to promote your company during the workshop and through the webpage.

If you are interested in sponsoring DSTC9, please contact the organizing committee (contact information below).

We hope you will be able to sponsor DSTC9, and we look forward to hearing from you!

Sincerely,

DSTC9 Organizing Committee (https://dstc9.dstc.community/organizing-committees)

Chulaka Gunasekara - IBM Research AI, USA

Seokhwan Kim - Amazon Alexa AI, USA

Abhinav Rastogi - Google Research, USA

Yun-Nung (Vivian) Chen - National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Luis Fernando D'Haro - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain