and respond to customer questions across the US. Ask Extension is a national initiative that leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to pull together data sources from the Extension ecosystem to answer questions directly and accurately and connect to local citizens with their local Extension professionals, products, and services. To date, September 2021 through February 2022, the following has been accomplished: ○ Implementation of new question reassignment user interface in Ask Extension ○ Development of containers in Google Cloud to improve security and reliability of infrastructure for Ask Extension ○ Ongoing bug fixes and feature development for Ask Extension ○ Continued development of Extension Chatbot ○ Successfully migrated Ask Extension server from AWS to Google Cloud Platform ○ Implementation and debugging of enhanced expert reassignment in Ask Extension ○ Eduworks has hired someone to help train the AI/chatbot platform on insect/pest image identification ○ Next steps are to: ■ Complete transition of Ask Extension to a new platform. ■ Complete hiring of image labeling intern and begin the labeling work. ● Helpdesk ○ In the specified date range, 339 clients were helped during the second quarter and 283 during the first quarter. The Helpdesk received a 94% satisfaction rating. 44% of the requests were first responded to within 12 of request submission. ● Search.extension.org The search team has met with several vendors over the past few months to compare cognitive search products and pricing. ○ MindBreeze (a cognitive search tool) was selected on December 3 and work has begun on building the custom search engine. ● The Artificial Intelligence work continued with the California Integrated Pest Management. Eduworks is working with California Integrated Pest Management (IPM) to triangulate questions/answers and images used to answer IPM questions, making sure the correct data tags are in place for machine learning. AI efforts are also underway with the University of Georgia Food Preservation NTAE Project. ● Web Hosting continued to be an important aspect of NTAE/Extension for managing access to content through technology. ○ 107 websites are hosted with a new archiving and deletion policy to sunset underperforming and abandoned sites. ○ Twelve sites have been switched to archive status and will be sunsetted in six months.
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