An artificial intelligence system, designed by students of a high school, which answers questions about the Ascoli Piceno Carnival and local traditions, is operational on the official website of the carnival festival: ilcarnevalediascoli.it.
The 'PicusBot' software was designed by a group of students from the IT major of the ITT "Fermi", in collaboration with the "Il Carnevale di Ascoli" association and former students of the institute.
The "Informatics - Data Strategist option: Artificial Intelligence and Data Science" address was established in 2022, one of the first high school courses on artificial intelligence created in Italy, in collaboration with the Marche universities.
"It is a chatbot system - explains Michele Coccia, one of the developers of PicusBot, who attends the third class of the IT course 'Fermi' - based on the LargeLanguage Model, similar to the one used by famous chatbots such as ChatGpt and Bard. In our case we improved the accuracy of the model by inserting documentation on local traditions, specifically selected, provided by the 'Il Carnevale di Ascoli' association. In this way we can be sure that the answers given by the chatbot are more relevant to the context, compared to those of generalist conversational models "My classmates and I chose the IT major with the artificial intelligence option to try our hand at an innovative sector. At the same time - adds Michele -, what I wanted most was to be able to create projects, such as PicusBot, useful to society, because for me this is artificial intelligence: a resource that concretely helps people in everyday life."
The project may soon become even more accurate.
Various entities attentive to the promotion of the territory have expressed their willingness to collaborate on the project and provide further useful materials to "train", as they say in technical jargon, PicusBot, which will therefore soon be updated to an even more powerful "2.0" version capable of communicating with citizens and tourists to help them learn more about the events, culture and traditions of Picene.
Reproduction reserved © Copyright ANSA