This October, the Weatherhead School of Management added a new AI Avatar Kiosk featuring the likeness of four Weatherhead professors. It was built this summer with xLab by a group of students, led by a second-year MBA student. The avatar kiosk offers interactive guidance to students.

There are three main components of the AI system. First, the kiosk has an interface which allows users to connect to a voice stream and AI video avatars. Second, it uses a real-time content generation engine powered by large language models that use previous lectures, courses and publications from the professors to provide contextual accuracy and create a life-like impression of the professor. Lastly, a backstage management platform allows new professors to be feasibly added to the educators featured in the kiosk.

“The goal for this kiosk is to showcase our faculty thought leadership and depth of knowledge in an interactive display, while also showcasing the types of projects students have the opportunity to work on while at Weatherhead,” Dean of Weatherhead School of Management Andrew Medvedev said.

The interactive and accessible kiosk provides high-quality information without the use of a 24/7 server. It challenged students to create a system that could reliably and continuously function throughout the day. Medvedev discussed the obstacles the group faced while constructing the hardware and software of the kiosks. 

“On the software side, the team spent a lot of time designing a system that’s easy to maintain using a serverless architecture,” Medvedev said. “On the hardware side, they had to carefully tune and integrate components to ensure everything was running smoothly without interruption. The students even built a native macOS application specifically to host the kiosk’s web interface, locking it down so users can’t easily exit the experience.”

Medvedev described what he hopes students will take away from the interactive experience. “[It] is a tangible example of students moving beyond the role of users of emerging technologies to becoming designers and builders of them.”