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Project Proposal – Linguis Aquilis

Overview

Artificial intelligence is one of the most important technologies of our time, and as such, it is our team’s aim is to experiment with and implement this technology. Our project will use AI/ML for purposes of natural language processing. We will develop a service that will allow students to find courses, and majors/minors that better suit their interests. For our implementation of AI, we will use cutting-edge research for feature extraction of natural language, and then implement a similarity search algorithm to find the most similar text based on the extracted features from user input. To accomplish this the project will also include the creation of a dataset based on all course descriptions of the university. For the first iterations of the program training of models will not be necessary. Later in the project, the team may evaluate the performance of our model and fine-tune it for more accurate feature extraction. The project will allow for three types of input. Users will input a description of a course they like, select courses they liked, and describe what areas of interest they have in studying. Our service will then extract a vector representation of the user input and find the most similar course description and/or major or minor. As a service, this will help students find courses and academic majors/minors that are most similar to their interests.

Requirements

This project will require the creation of a dataset, the creation of a web application on the back-end and front-end, and the engineering of AI/ML models. To create our dataset, scripts will have to be developed that parse through a .pdf containing all of the course descriptions of the university and create a data structure that our application and AI/ML model can use. To create the web application we will use Flask, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS for the front end and back-end. The back-end will include TensorFlow and vector-similarity search algorithms for our implementation of the AI. For this project to work our team will need to be able to utilize all of these tools together to create a working service.

Feasibility

The project will be mainly beneficial for students seeking guidance in terms of academic development. Moreover, the tool can be used by the university to identify courses and majors/minors that are similar to their interests. It can also be helpful to identify what topics are being covered by the curriculum. Additionally, academic advisors can use this tool to identify courses that will help students.

Of our team, both members have sufficient combined knowledge of web development and AI/ML technologies demonstrated by their professional and academic achievements. These achievements include coursework, certifications, and employment doing both. Version control will be used allowing each team member to work on their own unique branch, and then merge as the project progresses. Our team is confident in our ability to successfully accomplish this project.

In the big picture, this project translates to similar applications. With the tools and knowledge gained by implementing an AI/ML project, our team will have a stronger basis by which we can begin to develop more AI/ML applications.