Team: Pell Yeah

Team Participants:

  • Nicolas Holmgren

  • Aadesh Bamane

  • Joseph England

  • Faith Pollett

  • Karen Sica

“Our solution is an AI chatbot called Scholi, which allows the student to answer questions specific to scholarships. For example, the chatbot will ask, what’s your GPA? What’s your major? And based on their answers, it will pair them to the ideal scholarship.”

Problem

The Foothill-De Anza Community College Foundation manages dozens of scholarships with unique eligibility requirements but does not have dedicated staff for this department. Students often miss deadlines, are unaware of opportunities, or find the application process time-consuming, confusing, or repetitive. As a result, a significant amount of money that could help students is left unclaimed each year.

Technical Solution

The team developed an AI chatbot called “Scholi” to guide students through the scholarship application process. It uses a custom knowledge base of scholarships and their information, and employs the RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) model to search and match students with eligible scholarships based on their responses to questions about GPA, major, units taken, and other criteria.

Showcase

Presentation RecordingA recording of AI Summer Camp students presenting their project.
SlideshowThe accompanying slides shown in the video.
Source CodeAll 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.