The Mission

We aim to free up students' and advisors' time from needless bureaucracy.

Problem

RUG students often face overwhelming amounts of administrative information — from Teaching and Examination Regulations regulations to charters to graduation process instructions. As a result, students frequently struggle to find quick, clear answers to specific questions and resort to shooting emails to advisors, which is not the best use of either party's time. Simply put, students do not have a quick way of answering basic administrative and logistical questions.

The Solution

AdminPal is a clever friendly interface to the RUG administration for RUG students. This assistant leverages existing foundational AI models and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques to parse the often-lengthy rules, regulations and procedures in the university and provide answers to students' logistical and administrative questions. AdminPal has comprehensive access to the key documents and takes care to reference what sections its answers are based on. The assistant has unlimited patience, is available 24/7 for students and it has a superior response time to any human administrative staff. As a result, students do not have to wait a couple of working days for an advisor or a board secretary to answer. Perhaps more importantly, it reduces the load on student advisors, who often have to provide answers that are already available, yet are buried in PDFs that nobody can find and read. NOTE: we do not aim for the assistant to be a be-all and end-all solution for students' interactions with the student administration, as that is both undesirable and improbable. Rather, we want our system to be a first point of contact for students that provides some directional guidance and makes navigating subpages, links and PDFs a little easier.