Team: GavBot
Team Participants:
- Mia Aguirre
- Javael Boykins
- Margaret Malone
- Miles Martinez
- Yigit Arslan
“Students seem to be unable to find answers in a website that’s convoluted with a lot of stuff that’s hard to navigate.”
Problem
Gavilan College Library students face a service gap during evenings, weekends, and off-hours when librarians are unavailable, particularly affecting online students and those with non-traditional schedules who need immediate answers about library hours, laptop checkout, course reserves, database access, and account issues. The library currently receives repetitive questions that require navigating multiple web pages or waiting for staff to return, consuming librarian time better spent on in-depth research assistance. This limitation disproportionately impacts distance learners who need 24/7 access to library support but must wait for business hours to get help with routine inquiries.
Technical Solution
The GavBot team developed an AI-powered chatbot that provides 24/7 library assistance by leveraging AWS Lambda (a serverless compute service that processes requests without managing servers) for request handling and Amazon Bedrock (a managed service for foundation models) for natural language understanding. The solution uses retrieval-augmented generation to index Gavilan Library’s web content, policies, and service information stored in Amazon S3 (a cloud storage service), enabling instant responses to student questions about checkout procedures, database access, and library services. The platform processes natural-language queries through Amazon Bedrock‘s foundation models, which interpret student questions and retrieve relevant information from the indexed library resources, providing consistent, accessible support regardless of time or location while freeing librarians to focus on complex research assistance.
Showcase
| Presentation Recording | A recording of AI Summer Camp students presenting their project. |
| Slideshow | The accompanying slides shown in the video. |
| Source Code | All of the code and assets developed during the course of the AI Summer Camp. |
About the DxHub
The Cal Poly Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub) is a strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is the world’s first cloud innovation center supported by AWS on a University campus. The primary goal of the DxHub is to provide students with real-world problem-solving experiences by immersing them in the application of proven innovation methods in combination with the latest technologies to solve important challenges in the public sector. The challenges being addressed cover a wide variety of topics including homelessness, evidence-based policing, digital literacy, virtual cybersecurity laboratories and many others. The DxHub leverages the deep subject matter expertise of government, education, and non-profit organizations to clearly understand the customers affected by public sector challenges and develop solutions that meet the customer needs.