Learning Companion bot for Displaced Youth

Personal learning companion (Skype bot) that leverages AI to provide discovery and access to learning resources for displaced youth.

Displaced youth do not have a school to go to :-) They lose comradery and they end up with limited access to quality skills-training resources and academic courses which restricts the opportunities they have for education, dignified work and personal development. This can lead to early marriage for young girls, recruitment into terrorist organizations, and/or a lifetime of unskilled labor.

Our cross-functional, cross discipline v-team is creating a personal learning companion (bot) that will help provide displaced students easy and fast remote discovery - and access to - a curated set of free online learning resources based on individual needs and interests; and engages displaced youth in lifelong learning. The conversational UI of the bot will help guide the student from "I want a good job" to, for example, "here's a programming course in JavaScript" by asking a series of clarifying questions to help narrow down the course choices. In version 1, the student will then click a link to be taken to existing online course content. Over time, we want to integrate the video course content into Skype directly and support for offline access.

The chatbot experience will be supported and augmented by humanitarian partners who will provide access to community based computer labs and mentorship programs to guide youth in their search.

Note responding to Karim's comment - this solution requires internet connectivity - that could be at a center, or over a smartphone using low-bandwidth Skype. For now, we are focused on online course content, so internet access is required. We are aware of the need for offline access and it's on our feature list.

This is a unique partnership between academia, humanitarian agencies, and industry to build conversational artificial intelligence / machine learning to help displaced youth with career guidance and online learning resources. This is a partnership with University College Dublin, NetHope, Skype, Education Development Council, and the Norwegian Refugee Council and brings together technical and humanitarian expertise to address the growing problem of the lack of education for displaced youth.

The solution is a Skype chatbot, built on the Microsoft bot framework https://dev.botframework.com/ and leveraging Microsoft Cognitive Services https://azure.microsoft.com/en...

We are using Skype, a bot, cognitive services, and machine translation, hosted in Azure, to serve a conversational UI, eventually using machine learning to serve a "wiser older brother" personality conversation for displaced students. There is a lot of cool tech we've already got prototyped (conversation trees, rough speech interface (English and Levantine Arabic). Our developers are PhD students, so they are highly motivated to push envelope and use cutting edge tech.

We have a minimal viable product (English only) released to 15 students in Lebanon. Our hope is to announce an invite-only beta (in English and Arabic) in September and release in November with limited content. We are also scaling up a Cherokee version as well. After November, we will continue to curate learning resources and integrate course content into the bot.

While our focus now is on displaced youth, as this bot grows in capability through it's machine learning functionality, we believe we can expand the audience to include rural and disadvantaged students everywhere. In addition, as automation starts to displace industries and eliminate jobs, it offers a perfect opportunity to help unemployed workers (taxi drivers and truckers displaced by autonomous vehicles, etc) to re-skill and develop new 21st century skills.

We hope to have the bot available publicly in November. Displaced youth can add it to Skype through a link or through the store.

Our humanitarian partners - NetHope and Norwegian Refugee Council will help surface through their networks. We hope to reach out to more NGOs to get the word out when we are ready to scale.

We have 15 beta testers - students in Lebanon - today - we  hope to scale up in the fall, with the announcement of a larger beta in Sept and release in November. This is a free solution and uses AI and ML to help displaced youth find relevant learning resources.

It would be great to get to 100,000 in 12 months. In three years, we hope to have touched a million students.

We have a broad range of skills volunteering in this project. We have several senior engineers and engineering managers, NGO experience, computer science students, AI and conversational UI experience, educators, and project management experience. This cross group v-team is amazing - we have been working together about 9 months and is one of the most inspiring projects I've ever worked on :-)

not-for-profit - and in-kind donation from industry

We have been making great progress with a great cross-disciplinary v-team, but we believe that Solve can help raise awareness and help us recruit additional partners. As we think about scaling up our work, we will need more rigorous investment in operations and support, and we are optimistic that Solve can help us with that.

I think the key challenge ahead is moving from pilot to full scale operation. We have a great group of volunteers, interns, etc and will need to invest in a more robust team as we go forward.