Throughout our Advanced Topics in AI (ATAI) lecture, we introduce topics that explain the interplay between purely automatic AI methods and hybrid human-machine methods, emphasizing the importance of not only effective and efficient AI, but also responsible AI. Throughout the lecture, students have the opportunity to work on a practical project, in which they implement a conversational agent that uses the different technologies introduced in the lecture. At the end of the lecture, we organize an evaluation campaign in which all students can test their implemented conversational agent with real users – that being other students, or teaching assistants involved in the lecture. 

In order to facilitate and coordinate this evaluation campaign, we implemented a Web-based software infrastructure – dubbed Alan’s Speakeasy – that provides a graphical interface for human users to connect and have conversations in chatrooms and allows students to connect their conversational agents. Speakeasy also allows students to evaluate the conversational agents they talk to, using a survey that asks users to assess the accuracy of the conversational agents.   

We are honored to have been granted new funding by the UZH Teaching Fund via the innovation program that will allow us to extend the scope of Speakeasy. This project has a two-fold goal: Firstly, we would like to extend the implementation of the current software infrastructure – Speakeasy – to incorporate further features that will make the software more usable and more elaborate for running evaluation campaigns for conversational agents within the ATAI class.  Secondly, we would like to expand the scope of our software to reach a larger audience. Specifically, we would like to make our software useful for other organizations. We would like other research groups working on various aspects of AI (inside and outside UZH) to be able to reuse our software for teaching practical aspects of AI.