AI-supported consulting for module selection

HM students develop chatbot "Buddy" to search for ideal AW module.

From now on, students of the Munich University of Applied Sciences can be supported by the AI application "Buddy" when selecting the so-called AW modules. "Buddy" uses several AI services. From the course catalog, which is traditionally available as a document, the essential information is extracted by AI and stored in a database. This serves as the basis for an AI-based ChatBot component to generate suggestions based on a course of conversation in natural language. Buddy" is rounded off by a classic tabular display with search functions for a wide range of criteria, such as date, room or keywords.

"With Buddy, we want to save ourselves and our fellow students a lot of time, especially at the stressful time of the beginning of the semester," said the product owner of the chat bot team. "Here, we have to participate in many voting procedures in just a few days to put together our schedule. With Buddy, we don't have to read 150 pages of text anymore, but get meaningful results in a few steps." The product owners of the module search team add; "The keyword search can also be used to find interesting offerings that are more likely to be overlooked when reading the document - better and clearer than in the pdf version of the course catalog. Programming the AI to extract the data was a real challenge for the development team."

"Buddy" is the result of a series of student projects that began in the summer semester of 2020 as a challenge in the DTLab. Demonstrators and various prototypes were developed in several stages. The implementation into a first operational beta version took place in the winter semester 2022/23 within the "Laboratory for User-Centered Innovation".

"The lab provides students with infrastructures and teaching methods to deal with the design, development and deployment of innovative tools," says lab director Prof. Dr.-Ing Olav Hinz. "With Buddy, we designed and implemented the first project purely cloud-based. Our thanks go to DTLab, which enables us to use many of the cloud technologies," Olav Hinz continues.

The Challenge is a continuation of "Bots in Education - Buddy". It ended in WS 22/23 with the prototype going live on the "Campus Adventure Playground". In the future, Buddy will be operated and further developed by the "Laboratory for user-centered innovation" (LUCX) (https://lucx.wi.hm.edu).