Students studying artificial intelligence at the IU School of Informatics and Computing at IUPUI now will earn a Rasa AI Assistant Developer Certificate when they successfully complete a course in AI Bots and Cognitive Automation.
Rasa supplies conversational AI infrastructure for a global community of developers, providing the tools to build chat- and voice-based contextual assistants. Powered by open source software, Rasa runs in production everywhere from startups to Fortune 500s, in industries including health care, financial services, retail, and insurance.
Fawzi BenMessaoud, Ph.D., a lecturer in informatics and AI, has integrated Rasa AI application architecture and machine learning models, and building AI assistants, into one of the courses in SoIC’s Bachelor of Arts degree in Artificial Intelligence.
The course is I220, The Social Impact of Bots and Automation.
“Students in this course will now take a deep dive into Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and dialogue management,” BenMessaoud explains. “They’ll use the Rasa AI application architecture to adopt a Conversation-driven Development (CDD) model to generate custom actions and forms and build better AI assistants.”
Companies including Lemonade, Adobe, and T-Mobile have used Rasa to create AI assistants. Certification demonstrates a student’s knowledge of AI Assistant skills, including:
- Improving AI Assistants with Conversation Driven Development (CDD)
- Designing conversation paths and training data
- Collecting information with forms using custom actions
- Integrating with external APIs
- Connecting AI bots with messaging channels
More certifications to come
Plans are in the works to add opportunities for students to earn additional professional AI certificates as part of SoIC’s Bachelor of Arts in AI degree. “I am working on similar integration for my other courses in the program,” BenMessaoud says, “as part of providing students with the best of the two worlds, in terms of academic knowledge and real-world hands-on application from a practitioner’s perspective.”
A Rasa Certified Advanced Developer certificate is being mapped to the next course in the program, INFO-I 319 Cognitive Automation and Bots Development, he said.
“And I am mapping INFO-I 419 Enterprise Cognitive Automation to a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) certification from Automation Anywhere, which recently announced it’s joining with Google to develop AI- and RPA-powered services and push RPA adoption in the enterprise,” says BenMessaoud.
Coupled with machine learning, robot process automation can help employees to spend less time on tedious, repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on other areas.
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