ICDS News

Students from the RAGatha and Zoodo HackPSU ICDS challenge pose for a photo after a recent visit. Credit: Todd Price/ICDS

Penn State students shine at HackPSU with innovative chatbot solutions for ICDS

Two teams of Penn State students recently showcased their technical skills by developing real-time chatbots for the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) at HackPSU on Oct. 12 and 13. 

The teams, in the ICDS challenge, were tasked with creating a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) chatbot capable of answering client questions based on the ICDS user guide.  

“As freshmen in computer science, building Zoodu for HackPSU was an exciting challenge,” said Tejas Singhal, freshman computer engineering student, of Delhi, India. “We designed the chatbot using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques to create a more interactive and resourceful tool, blending real-time data and natural language processing. This experience allowed us to not only apply our learning but also explore how AI can provide practical solutions in real-world contexts.” 

 The chatbots were evaluated on their performance in a 10-question quiz administered by ICDS staff. The scoring also included user experience (UX) and design principles such as speed of loading and graphical user interface (GUI) layout. 

 “We utilized Langchain to manage data from the user guide by loading, splitting, and retrieval-augmented-question-answering processing in OpenAI LLM,” said Chaoping Li, freshman computer engineering student. 

 Out of seven other submissions, both the RAGatha and Zoodu teams created intuitive and efficient chatbots, demonstrating their ability to integrate complex technical knowledge with user-friendly design. 

 “We learned a lot about RAGs, Python, creating user interfaces. It was a great learning experience which supplements what we learn in classes at Penn State as engineering majors,” said Tina Zhang, freshman electrical engineering student. 

 To celebrate their work, the students from both teams demonstrated their tools to the ICDS engineering team and discussed AI and large language models in the field of high-performance computing. 

“I am very proud of our team and the product we came up with. Each challenge we faced during HackPSU brought us invaluable experience that will prove to be useful for many future endeavors,” said Ayden Alex, freshman computer engineering student. 

 Aryan Sabnekar, freshman computer science student, agreed with that sentiment. 

 “Building and testing our RAGatha chatbot taught us a lot about teamwork and problem-solving. Every time we fixed a bug or added a new feature, it felt like we were getting closer to something really amazing. It was hard work, but it’s one of the best things I’ve done in school so far,” Sabnekar said. 

The RAGatha team included Ayden Alex, freshman computer engineering student; Leona Chen, freshman computer science student; Chaoping Li; Aryan Sabnekar, freshman computer science student; and Tina Zhang, freshman electrical engineering student. 

The Zoodo team included four international freshman computer engineering students Tejas Singhal, of Delhi, India; Devank Yadav, of Gurgaon, India; Rishi Raj, of Dubai, UAE; and Rajveer Singh, of Dubai, UAE. 

“This was everyone in our team’s first ever hackathon experience. To say the least, it was a phenomenal experience, and we are proud to have learned a lot and created a working program within a single weekend,” Chen said. 

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