The world of technology is rapidly changing, and one must adapt to it quickly to survive in the race of ‘survival of the fittest’.
The Department of EEE has a team of postgraduate students from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati, along with their faculty members are developing an Artificial Intelligence-enabled Chatbot named “ALBELA” to teach and support the first-year students of Electrical & Electronics Engineering (EEE).
ALBELA is capable of addressing the queries and doubts that each of the approximately 850 students pursuing EEE at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) may have and can even scan and convert documents, PDFs or Word and provide results relevant to the query asked.
“We have been working on its development since the last 7 months with a team of dedicated 7 research scholars of the department. Earlier we did the trial runs of the Chatbot and started using from this academic session onwards. The response from the students has been overwhelming and we hope that this will become the new normal shortly. Prof. Rohit Sinha, Head EEE Department, and the team IBM have extended their continuous support for this activity.” Praveen Kumar, Professor, Department of EEE, IIT Guwahati, said in a statement.
According to the Institution, the chatbot would help students find their class schedule, tutorial schedule, and examination queries via an AI-based chat window. Students at times may hesitate to approach an instructor regarding their queries, but with this chat-based system, students can clear their doubts, both technical and non-technical.
“The team is developing analytical problem-solving skills. It will be helpful for the students to learn how to solve analytical problems related to the course. Within the next year, we will extend it to biomedical signal processing, electrical machine courses, said Samarendra Dandapat, Professor, Department of EEE at IIT Guwahati.
Sample chat of IIT Guwahati’s AI chatbot ‘ALBELA’
Features of ALBELA: IIT Guwahati AI-Chatbot
- Faculty information: Contact details, Name of faculty, subject covered by the faculty.
- Tutorial related queries: Timings and in which class will the tutorial will be held.
- Lecture schedule: Based on the registration number the location and the timing of the lecture
- Examination queries: Syllabus, location, timing, marking scheme and necessary information are given by ALBELA.
- Course curriculum: Syllabus and books related to a particular subject or exam.
- Utilization of Discovery service and Knowledge studio: For answering technical doubts using extracts from notes, textbooks, internet, and databases. At present, the Chatbot can extract useful information from unstructured data, i.e., it can document any format – PDF or Word or Text and produce results relevant to our query.
