IIT Guwahati develops AI chatbot ALBELA For Students of Electrical & Electronics Engineering

GUWAHATI: A team of IIT Guwahati develops AI Chatbot ‘ALBELA’ to teach and support first year students of Electrical & Electronics Engineering (EEE).

The world of technology is rapidly changing, and one must adapt to it quickly in order to survive in the race of ‘survival of the fittest’. A team of postgraduate students from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati, along with their faculty members are developing an Artificial Intelligence-enabled Chatbot–ALBELA -to teach and support the first year students of Electrical & Electronics Engineering (EEE). The researchers are from the Department of EEE.

Hence, an AI Chatbot is projectedto be a suitable mechanism also capable of addressing the queries and doubts that each of the approximately 850 students pursuing EEE at the Institute may have.

Talking about the Chatbot, ALBELA, Prof. Praveen Kumar, Professor, Department of EEE, IIT Guwahati, said, “We have been working on its development since last 7 months with a team of dedicated 7 research scholars of the department. Earlier we did the trial runs of the Chabot, 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 in near future. Prof.Rohit Sinha, Head EEE Department, and theteam IBM have extended their continuous support for this activity.”

As per a press release, ALBELA will provide round-the-clock support to students of IIT Guwahati by providing AI tutors. It will also provide smart content and personalized learning at new efficiencies (The teacher to student ratio will no longer be a limiting factor). Moreover, ALBELA will transform the role of ‘Teacher’ in the conventional classroom and introduce AI to pioneer a new landscape of technical education, stated a release.

Currently, ALBELA can respond to queries related to lecture schedule –Time and location where the lecture will be held based on the registration number given by the students, faculty information (both instructors and tutors) – name of faculty, contact details and the subject of EEE covered by faculty, tutorial related queries – Timing and classroom in which the tutorial will be held based on the registration number of the students, examination queries – all queries related to the exams, including necessary instructions, syllabus, location, timing, and marking scheme, course curriculum – syllabus related to specific exams (quiz or semester exams) with a list of reference books and textbooks and 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, that is, it can documents of any format – PDF or Word or Text and produce result relevant to our query.

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