​​​​​​​UU lets ChatGPT create personal student profiles

The university hopes to bring back the "community feeling" to the lecture hall by means of a project called YourUU. A few weeks ago, DUB reported that students seem to be less involved with their studies and less engaged with their classmates. 

"Students are still having a considerably hard time approaching other students," says project leader Maarten Nooitgedacht. "Therefore, already knowing something about the person sitting next to you in the lecture hall really comes in handy. For example, maybe both of you have been to Thailand."

Open Education
Additionally, the project marks the university's commitment to making its lecture halls "a safe environment" for thorny social discussions. UU is a proponent of "Open Education", the principle that education should be directly linked to current socio-economic and political issues.

Nooitgedacht: "In order to have an open and transparent debate, it is important to know the background of a person making a certain argument. If someone is very active within the LGBTQ+ community or campaigns for the Dutch farmers' party, that obviously says something about them."

The idea is that students will be able to access the profile pages of those taking the same courses as them. Said profile page will be based on a compilation of data and photos made by UU with the help of ChatGPT and other AI bots.

Cool
The concept and the idea to use this type of software came from three Computer Science students. Berend Witz is one of them: "It is striking how much information about UU students can be found online and I'm not only talking about their social media accounts. We started by making profile pages about girls we liked, just for fun, but then we realised there was much more potential in that idea. UU was interested right away."

Project leader Nooitgedacht: "Teachers and other staff members already have a public profile page, so we wanted to do the same for students. YourUU gave us the opportunity to collect all the necessary information in a fun, fast and efficient way. After that, we only had to add information from our own databases."

Witz hopes that the pages can eventually be made dynamic as well. "That means they will be continuously updated," he explains. "Fr example, you will soon be able to see who went to TivoliVredenburg last weekend, just like you. How cool is that?"

Students who are curious about the information that will be published on their YourUU page can send an email to ProjectYourUU@uu.nl from Saturday on. They can also use that e-mail address to indicate whether they want their profile to be visible to all UU students instead of only those taking the same courses as them. Those students will be included on a list of "YourUU stars".