ChatGPT Hackathon (in Russian) is an event organized by GigaSchool, an IT school founded by the companies Napoleon IT, Xpage, and PeopleDo. The hackathon was supported by Yandex Cloud and ITMO’s AI Talent Hub.
Participating teams had one task: to solve a burning problem in their field with an innovative project based on ChatGPT and developed in 48 hours.
The expert board, featuring representatives of Ozon, Huawei, RSHB-Intech, Napoleon IT, Xpage, PeopleDo, ASPRO, and TEKO, evaluated the projects based on their relevance in a specific field or society in general, depth of development, the use of ChatGPT, and the quality of the pitch. During the hackathon, students could use the virtual GPU service Yandex Cloud.
Among the 30+ teams from Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Georgia, ITMO’s team Levart came out on top. It consisted of first-year Master’s students Ivan Samosevich and Alexander Dupak from the Faculty of Technological Management and Innovations and Azat Sibagatulin and Nikita Lazutin from the Institute of Applied Computer Science. They developed a bot for ITMO students that creates a selection of university events based on data from numerous sources.
What the bot does
Team captain Ivan Samosevich knows from experience that it is hard to keep up with all the ITMO events, from lectures and exhibitions to conferences and contests.
The newly developed bot Levart, based on Telegram’s API, solves this problem by automatically collecting and systematizing all information about different events announced on university-affiliated VK pages and Telegram channels. The bot forwards these announcements to ChatGPT, which then writes short descriptions for every event. As a result, users receive a structured overview of events that is just a three-minute read.
“Whereas normally such guides are made by people, we relied on ChatGPT to speed up and fully automate the process. In order to produce short overviews of events, we applied a text summarizer,” explained Ivan Samosevich.
So far, the bot works with pages and channels of ITMO’s Art & Science Center, Career Center, the Center for Student Science, Conferences, and Exhibitions, KronBars, and several others. To get your selection of events, you just need to select the time period you are interested in. The resulting summary will feature links to full descriptions of each event.
In the future, the team wants to translate the bot into English and Chinese for use by international students. It will also be able to search for events on a particular topic, remind users about deadlines, add events to digital calendars, and even report on events outside ITMO. Moreover, the students are planning to integrate the bot as a feature into Yandex’ personal assistant Alice, who would then be able to talk about upcoming ITMO events.
Speaking of upcoming events, those interested in AI and machine learning should mark March 28 on their calendars – on that day, Andrey Sebrant, the director of marketing services at Yandex, will talk about the use of these technologies in studies and research. Sign up for the event here (will be held in Russian).
