Advancing Technology for CES
Objective 1. Foster opportunities for innovation by connecting CES personnel with new and innovative technologies that engage a wide array of learners. ● Enhance and upgrade existing functionalities ● Provide customer support, including help-desk staffing, web hosting, training and software licenses. ● Provide infrastructure support for technical and architectural standards. Why is this important? Advancing technology for CES databases and for CES program delivery is critical for CES professionals to have access to newly developed information and to advance on critical issues and educational endeavors. ● Ask Extension is redesigned to replace Ask An Expert. This redesign is built to use artificial intelligence to provide additional power for database searches and the ability to answer 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. ● Ask Extension-Continued bug fixes and maintenance for Ask Extension. Implemented Mindbreeze search functionality on the front page of the site for general use by experts and the public. ● Ask Extension experts are pleased with the performance updates on the site and we feel system performance and speed is no longer a lingering issue for users. Experts gave positive feedback on the Mindbreeze Search implementation. We also shared a survey with all Ask Extension experts and the results were generally positive with 80% of those surveyed felt that Ask Extension is either a critical or important part of their work and the same percentage feels that AE is critical or of great value to the public. ● Anticipated work for the next reporting period (Year 4, September 1, 2022 - November 30, 2022): ○ We will be creating a new instance of the chatbot that has Ask Extension data feeding the back end. ● Helpdesk ○ In the specified date range, we helped 427 clients and received a 79% satisfaction rating from those. We resolved 45% of the requests in our first response and
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