Research Showcase 2017

IBM Challenge

Virtual Assistants are widely prevalent in various forms and domain. One such target domain is Personal Banking Assistance. Information related to account balance, account statement, fund transfer, mobile recharge, fixed deposits, BYOM (Be your own Master) Loans are frequently sought after. This information is often accessible through a dedicated channel and platform. This challenge aims at addressing Personal Banking Assistance through a Chatbot service. Chatbot is a service powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence. It allows the user to interact with services using a messaging interface or voice commands. The concept is that this service can be integrated with any of the platforms commonly used by customers, for example, Facebook messenger or mobile phone keypad. The customer does not need to open any web pages or separate apps to do a financial transaction and the whole activity can be undertaken in natural language.

IIIT-Delhi, IBM and Federal Bank are excited to announce this real world coding challenge to students, budding entrepreneurs and fellow tech enthusiasts. The challenge is to develop the Chatbot platform (Text enabled and Voice enabled) where any customer can interact using natural language. The inputs can be via a messaging interface or voice. The platform should be developed in such a matter that Bank services can be plugged in and removed at any time without disrupting the whole platform.

What?

RS'17 - IBM Challenge is a coding competition towards solving a real world problem. You can participate as an individual or as a team of not more than 3 members. Following are the services that ought to be customized and offered (participants can choose any two of these) -

Balance Enquiry
Account Statement to email id.
Fund transfer
Mobile Recharge
Fixed deposit Opening
BYOM (Be your own Master ) Loans

Click on How to Build a Chatbot to learn more.

Sample Questions for few scenarios of Chat Bot of Federal Bank: You will need some of the ways in which customers ask questions for each scenario. Some examples of first question in each scenario are as follows (students are expected to create variety of questions for every subsequent question which customer can ask) -
Some of the ways the customers ask Balance Enquiry are the following -

What is my balance
How much money do I have in my account
Whats my account balance
Account balance please

Questions for other scenarios click here

Q&A Flow for few scenarios of Chat Bot of Federal Bank: You will need example of one sample Q&A flow for each of these scenarios , for example, there could be variations in each flow depending upon each scenario, please tweak it as per your wisdom
For Balance enquiry this could be a possible scenario of questions for Q&A

Customer : What is my balance
Bot : Whats is your bank account number ?
Cust : 1234567890/my account number is 1234567890 (there could be other ways a customer may answer which bot should understand, please take care of all possible answer scenario)
Bot : Please enter your 4 digit verification pin
Cust : 0987 (Customer could ask a question in return if it does not understand)
Bot : Your available balance is INR 98765321

Q&A flow for other scenarios click here

Assumptions

Students can assume safely the following -

A list of customers name and other attributed like, bank account number, balance, dates, Mobile number etc which would be needed to execute the chat bot.
Where ever possible please refer to Federal Bank website www.federalbank.co.in for more information, else one can make all logical assumptions in making of this Bot.

Participants can refer to the following Instructions to get started.

Register your team here.
Details and instructions to create an IBM Blue Mix account and test APIs about IBM Blue Mix platform can be found here.
Github link of code submission must be mailed to rssubmission@iiitd.ac.in along with team details. Please ensure that your submission contains the Code along with instructions on how to run it. Please refer to FAQs for further details.

Code submission will be done in two phases -

In the first phase, a brief Abstract and flow diagram about the Participants approach should be presented. The write-up should not be more than one page. The write-up must convey the following -

1) Technical Architecture Diagram - addressing the problem statements
2) In the conversations flow - Creating an intent for the problem statements (it can be in json or csv format)
Tutorial - (https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/doc/conversation/intents.html)
3) Clear idea on language they use for the building the App , how do they plan to use bluemix for the same. -Not more then 100 words

In the second phase, the code along with instructions on how to run the code must be submitted to rssubmission@iiitd.ac.in The subject of the mail must be "IBM Challenge submission - <Team Name>". In place of <Team Name>, please write your team name. Since IBM is the technology partner, IBM will share its Blue Mix platform tools to participants, which must be used for the challenge. Participants are encouraged to use programming languages such as JAVA or Python.

In case of queries, participants can post questions on StackOverflow or at IBM India University Relations (for non-technical queries).

Evaluation Criteria

Following is the selection criteria

Submissions will be evaluated by an expert jury panel from IBM.
Five best submissions will be invited for presentation. The details of the presentation will be shared with these teams at a later date.

Important Dates

Last date for phase I submissions - 14th March 2017
Webinar - 15th March 2017
Last date for phase II submissions - 24th March 2017
Selection of top 5 teams - 27th March 2017
Presentation at RS'17 - 01st April 2017

Prize Money

1st prize - 15000
2nd prize - 10000
3rd prize - 5000

RS'17, IIIT-D	IBM India University Relations