We have a number of GenAI Tools that employees (and students) can begin to use for administrative tasks. Google Gemini Advanced works well with our Google Workspace environment and can help people manage their tasks, calendar, and email. Microsoft Copilot Pro is a powerful tool when integrated with the Microsoft applications. Finally, the Amplify AI product provides employees with access to a variety of generative AI chat interfaces.
Generative AI, or GenAI, can be a powerful productivity tool that has the potential to increase productivity in our everyday work. UMBC wants to be at the forefront of supporting employees in using these tools to improve service and give employees more time to provide personalized support. As we use AI, we want administrative use of AI to be guided by the following principles:
- We want to safeguard data in on our use of AI. Please remember, unless you are using a tool from the GenAI Tools web page, you may only use public data with a generative AI service. Using any UMBC proprietary data is forbidden.
- We want to support excellent self-service and err on the side of correct information over guessing. Our goal in launching myUMBC Answers was to provide students self-service, personalized and curated information without having to search our websites. In building myUMBC Answers, we have limited and focused the sources of data we use.
- We want to learn what does and doesn’t work. GenAI is a new technology that is evolving rapidly, we want to understand what does and doesn’t work. Sharing feedback is essential to help us learn what does and doesn’t work.
myUMBC Answers
The myUMBC Answers service uses UMBC’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment to run our Portal to redefine the myUMBC Search function. The original search has been extended with Amazon’s Bedrock AI services, where you can ask it questions and myUMBC will answer the question. The initial focus on this has been on answering questions that students may have, including questions specific to them, here are some examples of questions it can answer:
- How many days are left on my parking permit?
- What is my date that I can register for classes?
- What is my GPA?
- What funds are on my campus card?
- Where is the career center?
- What are the hours to the tutoring center?
myUMBC Answers utilizes information from the student handbook, some of UMBC’s authoritative web sites, and your data that would be summarized on your myUMBC profile. For staff that answer student questions, we encourage you to try the questions you get from students in myUMBC Answers and give us feedback on how it works.
Over the summer, we will be working to extend this to better support faculty and staff by working with groups to add more content into our answers. Departments interested in working with DoIT on this should reach out to the myUMBC Team.
AI integration into RT (in alpha testing)
If you are someone that is responsible for answering RT student support tickets, we are interested in working with a few departments that have good student documentation or FAQs available to expand our testing of providing support staff with access to use GenAI services to provide answers inside RT. DoIT staff have been testing this with an RT enhancement defined by the RT queue the ticket is assigned too. When enabled, RT will show the AI answer to the question and provide a way to send the AI answer as the RT reply to the ticket. We hope over time, as we improve documentation, we hope that this could help many overburdened support staff increase their productivity and have time to do other tasks.