In a collaboration between IS LTW and the School of Education, we seek to pilot a Twitterbot service for the University.

At least 10 groups within the University have expressed an interest in provding such a solution to support their students, including online and on-campus courses, and support services such as IS Helpline.

​The Digital Education Group in the School of Education has successfully developed and demonstrated the use of "Teacherbot", a chatbot on Twitter to support distance students taking a MOOC.   This research was done with the support of a CHSS Challenge Investment Fund grant and in partnership with Design Informatics.

This proof-of-concept has been popular with students, and gained a lot of publicity for the University, for example see  "Ask teacherbot: are robots the answer? " THES, May 2015, https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/ask-teacherbot-are-robots-the-answer/2020326.article​

The proposed pilot will use a commercial cloud-based solution, Pandorabots.  Using Pandorabots will enables us to rapidly provide a service-ready chatbot with integrations to a range of online channels, including common social-media platforms, at a cost of $2,400 per annum, https://developer.pandorabots.com/#plans

The service will enable teaching and support teams to easily create and maintain their own chatbot, designed to meet the specific information and support needs of their users, and integrate it with their own social media accounts, with no software coding required.

Chatbots will be defined and maintained in an open standard markup language, AIML. This makes the chatbots easily portable to other platforms in the future, and enables the use of the off-the-shelf chat personalities, such as Alicebot, for generic interactions.

The pilot service will be developed and supported by a part-time PhD intern, based in the WGI section of IS LTW, with Supervision, direction and support from IS LTW WGI (Martin Morrey, Marissa Wu, Hristo Meshinski) and the School of Education (Prof Sian Bayne, Jeremy Knox).   We are hoping this would interest a PhD student already working on applications of artificial intelligence.

Costs are: 

• ​UE05 0.2 FTE, 1 year (£6,000)
• 1 year license for Pandorabots (£2,000).​