The goal of Project Ethel is to build an AI-based open-source virtual teaching assistant for courses at ETH Zurich and elsewhere, which can support students and lecturers by holding office hours (“chat”), providing feedback on assessments, and pre-grading assignments.
Toward that end, artifacts generated or collected within a course, such as lecture scripts, slides, lecture recordings, homework assignments, and library materials, will be collected and made available in a learning content management system, processed through input pipelines, and used to augment inputs to standard Large Language Models.
The talk presents a number of feasibility studies for different aspects of Ethel and discusses preliminary experiences from pilot studies within a handful of courses.
Gerd Kortemeyer is a member of the Rectorate and AI Center of ETH Zurich, as such, he spearheads initiatives to integrate Artificial Intelligence into Higher Education.