Ethel
Virtual Teaching Assistant.
Last updated February 13, 2024.
![A steampunk-style machine at a university](/en/the-eth-zurich/education/ai-in-education/projects/ethel/_jcr_content/par/textimage_1980498441/image.imageformat.text50percent.1281895329.jpg)
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.
The custom-chatbot component of Ethel is online now: https://ethel.ethz.ch/ - access is limited to ETH affiliates.
Interested faculty are invited to submit their course scripts, however, this works best with English-language materials and scripts that contain more text than math.
Comments, suggestions, etc.: Gerd Kortemeyer,