Inspiration
From lengthy, confusing degree audits to lists of major requirements, making sure you are on the right path to graduate can be confusing. This leads to an influx of repetitive emails for academic advisors and distress for students. We wanted to create a solution to help students and advisors navigate their academic journey here at Tufts.
What it does
Our project is a two-fold solution designed to modernize academic advising. On one side, we've developed an advising chatbot interface that both students and advisors can use to get quick, informed responses to academic policy questions. On the other, we've built an Outlook plugin that leverages our API and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system to automatically generate draft responses from advisor emails, saving time and ensuring consistency in communication.
How we built it
We used Microsoft Graph API to detect new emails and generate informative, outlined responses based on a RAG model using ChatGPT. We also implemented a chat box for students using the same API.
Challenges we ran into
Many of the concepts utilized in this project were unfamiliar to us. Some of the techniques used in this project, such as RAG aren't taught in your regular CS class here at Tufts.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud to making a working plugin extension for Outlook that produces a quality, informative, and professional email draft.
What we learned
We learned how to use Microsoft Office add-ins. We also learned how to further augment a RAG trained AI.
What's next for TuftsAdvisor
We hope students and advisors will be able to implement this tool and it will be able to offer greater clarity and support to them during their time at Tufts.
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