UCInsider

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  Want to know if you should take CS 161 with Shindler and ICS 53 with Wong-ma at the same time?

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  Want to know if you should take ICS 33 with Thornton?

Inspiration

One of the biggest stressors for CS studnets is choosing what classes to take the next quarter. "Is ICS 33 with Thornton hard" or "Should I take CS 161 with Shindler and ICS 53 with Wong-Ma in the same quarter?" are common questions. Instead of spending hours scrolling Reddit or asking around on Discords, we sought to make it easier by having a bot that could summarize students' opinions and experiences with CS classes.

What it does

Uses RAG with r/UCI as context to generate responses to queries about CS classes specifically (we only have cs classes).

How we built it

The frontend was deployed using AWS Amplify, the responses integrated as an AWS Lambda function. We used AWS Bedrock's Claude 3.7 Sonnet to generate the RAG based response and Claude 3.5 Haiku to generate a summary. The RAG's knowledge base was implemented with a S3 bucket containing json files from r/UCI's api indexed by classes and the Titan Embeddings G1 as the embeddings model.

Challenges we ran into

The team was inexperienced with both frontend and backend, so the main challenge was learning the basics of building an app in addition to learning how to work with AWS.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to deploy a functinoal app that sometimes gives good answers.

What we learned

RAG is a powerful tool, but is limited by the quality of the knowledge given.

What's next for UCInsider

To implement a better UI, refine responses, and give the knowledge base more data (we focused on CS classes but it could be implemented for all classes).

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• javascript
• python