At this year’s Lancaster University Undergraduate Research Conference which was held virtually between 10th and 17th March 2021, four Final Year LUG students presented topics based on their individual research. Our students were part of a series of presentations made by students from Lancaster University’s campuses in Germany, England, China and Malaysia.
We are proud to announce that Computer Science student Lancine Conde, received the Best Research Presentation Award for STEM: Computing!
Speaking to Lancine, who is from Guinea, to share more information on his presentation and project, he said “My research aims at identifying the potential uses of chatbots in the educational context for improving current e-learning platforms which suffer from poor course completion and user retention rates. Chatbots are conversational robots that make use of natural language processing and machine learning to converse with users over a chatroom. They are already being deployed in a variety of fields but are still mostly used in marketing. The research will ultimately see the construction of a chatbot tutor prototype for teaching basic to intermediate French vocabulary to English speakers. The bot will try to bring in the more personal and dynamic dimension that traditional e-learning platforms lack by mirroring the relationship between a tutor and a student. Chatbot building tools have tremendously improved during the past five years and now require few to no programing knowledge to use. This means that anyone can get a bot running in a matter of days, therefore it may be the right time for educators to start looking into chatbots as a possible means to dispense their knowledge.”
Well done Lancine!
Below is a list of our students and their presentation details:
- Maame Araba Abokuma Aggrey-Fynn, Accounting & Finance – Understanding the effects of financial disclosures on Companies: An analysis of financial disclosures made by BAT
- Isabella Aggrey, Politics & International Relations – You Strike a Woman, You Strike a Rock: Examining African Feminisms in the Socio-economic and Political Spheres of Africa
- Awurakua Afaribea Yirrah, Law – Terrorising Terrorism: the role of international law
- Lancine Conde, Computer Science – Chatbot Tutors for e-learning
