I’m honored to announce that the Arizona Water Chatbot (aka AZ Waterbot) is live now! You can use the bot to get answers about Arizona water issues at http://AZwaterbot.org.
The biggest thank you goes to Briana Rajan, who took this project from an on-paper idea into a working tool. This project would not exist without her, and I am deeply grateful to her for sharing her experience and incredible abilities with this project in ’23-24.
Thank you also to Srinivasan Ravichandran, who has worked with me on the user interface for this project for many months and through many iterations. (He will likely work on many more, as we continue to work together.)
Thank you to Sharan Padmanabhan for working on the deployment of the bot (and for upcoming feature developments, as we work together this year).
Thank you to Naman Mistry and Arun Arunachalam at the ASU Artificial Intelligence Cloud Innovation Center for helping us deploy the bot in AWS.
Thank you to Claire Lauer for being an invaluable partner in this work at every single stage of the process.
Thank you to the leadership of the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative and the Impact Water – Arizona program (Dave White, Susan Craig) for supporting this project throughout its many twists and turns so far. I am grateful also for the funding of this project, which was provided by ASU’s Arizona Water Innovation Initiative and the Impact Water – Arizona program, courtesy of the State of Arizona and the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust.
Thank you to Anjana Ouseph for shepherding the bot through this summer’s massive data update.
Thank you to Mayank Muthyala for evaluating the bot’s effectiveness against other tools and authoring a journal article about it.
Thank you to all the students of TWC 544 User Experience in Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 who helped user test the bot, as well as all of the research assistants of the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative who have contributed feedback and ideas to current and upcoming versions of the bot.
Thank you to Faith Kearns, who wrote a long article about the process of developing the bot that just arrived.
Thank you to God for pointing me into a career where I can develop tools to help the community I live in.