Veranstaltung

Relevant literature will be made available in the seminar.

This course focuses on the design, development, deployment, and evaluation of conversational agents (e.g., chatbots or voice assistants) for a given problem domain (e.g., customer service, team collaboration). The aim of the course is to introduce conceptual and technical foundations of conversational agents, relevant theories of human-computer interaction, and design guidelines for different classes of conversational agents. In addition, the course will introduce the human-centered design approach adapted to the design of conversational agents, including several qualitative and quantitative evaluation approaches.

The entire course is held virtually with no physical meetings, providing a first experience for future workplace scenarios. The course is a joint offering together with Saarland University (Prof. Stefan Morana) and Technische Universität Dresden (Prof. Benedikt Brendel). Students will work collaboratively in virtual teams with students from the other universities (i.e., one student per university in one team). Each student team will iteratively design, develop, and evaluate a conversational agent using contemporary technology tools (e.g., Google Dialogflow, Microsoft Bot Framework, Rasa). The teams document their activities and results in a project report. The project report as well as the conversational agent prototype are the basis for the grading of the course.

The entire course is limited to 15 participants (5 per university) and requires a short registration. More details will be made available on our website.