IIT Guwahati develops AI chatbot to support EEE students

Guwahati, Sep 3 (IANS) In a bid to promote learning through Artificial Intelligence (AI), 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 first year students of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (EEE).

"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 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 in near future. 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.

The chatbot would help students find their class schedule, tutorial schedule, and examination queries via a 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, according to the institution.

"The team is developing the analytical problem solving skill. It will be helpful for the students to learn how to solve analytical problems related to the course. Within next one year, we will extend it to biomedical signal processing, electrical machine courses, said Samarendra Dandapat, Professor, Department of EEE at IIT Guwahati.