IIT Guwahati professors develop an AI-enabled Chatbot teacher - ALBELA - to teach EEE students

In the age of AI-based technology, do we need a classroom and a teacher? Guess Not! Looks like bots are taking over the role of teachers too. 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.

Researchers believe that the AI Chatbot is projected to 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 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 the near future. Prof. Rohit Sinha, Head EEE Department, and the team IBM have extended their continuous support for this activity.”

Explaining the working model of the Chatbot, Prof. Samarendra Dandapat, Professor, Department of EEE, IIT Guwahati, said, “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 the next one year, we will extend it to biomedical signal processing, electrical machine courses.”