I have two new proceedings papers published from SIGDOC 2024.
I’m very grateful to Mayank Muthyala for lead authoring “So You Want to Build a Chatbot? A Systematic Case Study Comparing the Design and Development of Two Water Chatbots” comparing the features and capabilities of two different ways of making a water chatbot. AZ Waterbot (a custom architecture) is one of the bots tested, alongside a custom GPT bot. Here’s the abstract:
Chatbots have become a popular method through which to deliver conversational-style information to users about a range of topics, including providing customer service, news and weather updates, educational content, and medical information. This article compares two chatbots created with different methods, including via custom architecture and custom GPT to determine the strengths and limitations of the development methods. The bots that our research team developed were built to deliver information about water and drought to Arizona residents. We compare the initial setup process, customization capabilities, the training process, prompt engineering requirements, file handling, costs, and outputs of each bot. The custom architecture bot offers the flexibility and control of answers, but it costs more than its comparator and takes more time. The custom GPT requires little experience with Large Language Models (LLMs) and no experience with coding, but offers less control. Because we recognize that public agencies often don’t have the expertise or funding to build a fully-customized bot architecture, we conclude with suggestions about the contexts and purposes or which each type of bot should be developed.
In addition to AZ Waterbot, I’ve been working with a (massive) team to develop a VR experience about Advanced Water Purification technology. Several of our team (Kat Lambrecht, Claire Lauer, Andrew Mara, and I) worked together to write a paper about the ethics of VR experiences. It’s published now! Here’s the abstract:
For those working in technical fields, the promise of Virtual Reality (VR) to provide engaging experiences that go beyond typical learning modalities has enormous potential to expand how we communicate with a variety of audiences. However, as is common with emerging technologies, intentionality, strategy, and ethical considerations attached to VR need to be designed from the ground up, rather than as an afterthought. In this paper, we offer one framework for building ethics into the design of Virtual Reality experiences to ensure that the process is centered in community and student needs. Grounding our work in an advanced water purification VR project that we created with our students and Immersive Experience partners, we share the ethical framing, course sequencing, and engagement strategies that we employed to ensure an ethical design.
I’m also honored to report that this paper received an Honorable Mention for Best Paper at SIGDOC 2024. Go team!