2017 Results

Established in 2017, the Nittany Watson Challenge was the original incarnation of the Nittany AI Challenge. Teams of students, faculty, and staff competed for awards totaling $100,000 in grant money by utilizing IBM Watson to improve the student experience at Penn State.

The Challenge progressed through several phases — starting with idea generation, moving to prototype development, and ending with the creation of Minimum Viable Products (MVPs).

2017 Nittany AI Challenge Results

Minimum Viable Products

Collanote: Making Note-Taking Great Again
Learning is a collaborative effort not only between students and professors, but between students themselves. Collanote provides a central hub for note-taking in each class, offering collaborative notes, full search capabilities, dynamic Q&A, and lecture transcription for students in real time on one shared document.

Intelligent Academic Advisor
The Intelligent Academic Advisor provides a question answering system able to help students with all their advising needs, using corpus-based knowledge dynamically collected and curated from the public data and documents of Penn State.

Penn State Student Connection
Penn State Student Connection will help new and existing students more fully engage in their campus and relevant activities by tailoring news and events to their preferences. It will serve as a central location for students to find or get to know people in their major and to keep them up to date with events tailored to their interests.

TransferMatch: Your best match for college credit
This tool will provide intelligent pre-evaluation of transfer credits to prospective students, improving their experience and helping recruitment and retention efforts by providing vital information that prospects expect from an institution like Penn State.

Virtual Advisor
The Virtual Advisor offers an AI–powered assistant focused on alleviating student frustrations by providing timely advisement and augmenting Penn State’s human advisors so they can focus on students facing unique challenges.

Email us for additional information on the 2017 MVPs.