Ethel

Ethel is an experiment.

It will be a virtual teaching assistant, currently conceptualized by the rectorate and the ETH AI-Center. Tasks will include:

• Chat ("office hours")
• Feedback for formative assessment
• Triage and assistance in grading tasks
• Intelligent search and referencing of course documents
• Making documents assessible

Ethel will work for one course at a time; the tools will be developed such that they are targeted and specialized for particular courses in order to addess the needs of the learners.

Design principle are:

• Equal access: making a state-of-the-art AI accessible to all students at ETH.
• Privacy: all data remains on Swiss servers and will not be made available for general training purposes.
• Abstraction: built such that the underlying Large Language Model and multimodal input pipelines are exchangeable.
• More facts, less hallucinations: responses will be backed up by course materials: lecture scripts, lecture recordings, slides, exercises, library materials, ...
• Just-in-time feedback: providing timely feedback to learners.
• Scalability of learning scenarios: by assisting educators in their daily tasks, they can work human-to-human with more learners.

Interested in experimenting? For students, there are masters thesis projects associated with the development and testing of Ethel. If you are teaching at ETH, you can also get involved.