Like Aladdin with his famous lamp, each SNU student has been granted a personal genie, a helpful artificial intelligence that makes life as a student easier. Born of a rigorously researched set of data analytics, the SNU cyber-genie keeps track of your grades and your grueling progress towards graduation and rewards you with recommended courses to help you stay on track. We set about to learn more about the SNU Genie by sitting down with its creator, Professor Kim, Bum-Soo of the College of Liberal Studies.
Professor Kim, Bum-Soo (College of Liberal Studies)
Could you introduce yourself to our readers?
Hi. When I was a student I studied politics but now I study and teach human rights ideology and political theory. I have served as Associate Dean of Student Affairs as well as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at various points in my career, and I think those experiences have given me insight into some of the difficulties that students in our school have, especially information-wise. For example, students in the College of Liberal Studies have to take classes from a number of different departments, and it becomes confusing exactly what and how many classes they have to take from these various departments in order to graduate. I thought, what if there were an SNU Genie that could alleviate these difficulties? Fortunately, a lot of other faculty members had recognized the same problems that I saw and so we teamed up to bring SNU Genie into being.
What makes SNU Genie different from the other informational services offered online by our university?
Academic information provided by the SNU portal site is limited. There’s no feature that helps students design an academic timeline. We surveyed over 4000 students, talked to several students, and found that most didn’t even know what kind of information was provided on the school website. In many ways, an accessible, appealing, and intuitive system such as SNU Genie was long overdue.
We thought that SNU Genie should let users recommend courses that were fun to take, and courses that were valuable in furthering their studies in their majors. We wanted to come up with a recommendation system that recommended things that would actually be valuable to students. We collected data, especially from course registration periods, and came up with an algorithm that recommended classes based on the classes a student had already taken. We’re also in the process of developing a service that lists out classes that are necessary to graduate and classes that aren’t necessary but probably helpful, based on a student’s department. In essence, we’re trying to make a service that’s intuitive to students and provides them with all the information that they might need about a class.
How do you use SNU Genie? There’s a ‘Student Designed Major’ feature – could you tell us more about this?
‘Student Designed Major’ was originally for Liberal Studies students but is about to be available to all students starting next year. When students search for classes to take, the search engine provided by our school does a poor job of finding the perfect class. For example, if you want to take a class about Islam, you’ll only be able to search for classes with “Islam” in the course’s title. We’ve expanded on this so that keywords and acronyms yield related results based on not just the course title, but on the syllabus as well. Students that searched for a class will also be able to find other similar classes based on previous students’ search results.
To further help students design their own majors, we created a database of all the research conducted by our faculty. This way, students who’re interested in furthering their studies in a particular field can enter a keyword and find professors and papers related to that keyword. Basically, the Genie will tell you anything about a class, a major, a subject, or a professor, if you just feed it a key word.
How do you make use of SNU Genie?
I call for the Genie when finding professors to collaborate with. I believe it’s important to conduct joint research and through Genie, I’m able to search and meet professors of various fields.
How do you believe Genie will develop in the future?
We tried to incorporate SNU Genie into our course registration program, but the process took longer than expected. We hope that sometime in the near future, SNU Genie will be able to help students sign up for classes as well. We want SNU Genie to be able to help create timetables and a four-year roadmap. For students looking to embark on a double major, we hope that SNU Genie will be able to help sort out the convoluted graduation requirements. All of this and more have been in the works for the past three years and it will all be made available sooner than you might think. We’ve already implemented a number of services that we’d brainstormed, such as a program that allows students to compare exchange programs, but we want to take this one step further by allowing students to register for exchange programs through the Genie itself. We want the Genie to be all-encompassing, something that students can turn to for anything.
I’m really looking forward to the day when course registration can be conducted through SNU Genie. Students will have a much easier time signing up for classes, and they’ll also provide us and the Genie with much needed data to further improve our features. My goal is that SNU Genie will one day be a much-welcomed helping hand for every SNU student.
*This is a translated version of an article written on April, 2021.
Source: https://liberaledu.snu.ac.kr/board/blog/view/473
Written by Cheesue Kim, SNU English Editor, cheesuerocket@gmail.com
Reviewed by Professor Travis Smith, Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, tlsmith@snu.ac.kr