Siblings Arjun and Nikita Hari are taking career guidance into the future with the help of artificial intelligence
Text Credit: Rochelle D’Souza Photos: Rajith Rathiyappan
For most kids of the pre-millennial generation, choosing your own line of education and employment was something that seemed highly unlikely. Most children’s professions are destined and decided the day they came out of the womb. Doctor, engineer, lawyer, civil servant. God forbid, if you ever tried to suggest or even imply indirectly that you someday wish to pursue a career as a musician, an artist, designer or some such, you would be instantly punished before being sent to your room – sans dinner – to read up on your medical entrance study material.
During his first year of college at IIM Kozhikode, Arjun Hari came across a case study on the education system and its downfalls. “I was reading up about a case study about the state of the education system across the world and it made me curious because I found that most students encountered issues later on in life – irrespective of which stream they chose – because whatever they chose to do, they come out of it without any sort of skill. And one of the biggest reasons for this was because these students weren’t actually interested or inclined towards these streams, but rather they were pushed to pursue it.”
As children, we know what we want to be from as young as our high school days but we do not get the right kind of orientation to guide us or help us hone those skills. “I had friends who studied engineering in an IIT and then quit their jobs to pursue careers that are on the complete opposite spectrum – like filmmaking – and have become highly successful at it. So the question is, why waste a few good years doing engineering in the first place?” And this was the moment that Edu-WUDI came to be.
Founded by Arjun and his sibling Nikhita, WUDI is an artificial intelligence-driven data analytics product that can seamlessly interface to derive behavioural insights, business intelligence and more. Nikita and Arjun are currently in the process of incorporating WUDI in the educational system. ‘Edu-WUDI’ is a free analytical product to help educational institutions, teachers, students and parents to discover the real talent in every child. WUDI was created with the core idea that every student’s potential is way more than his/her GPA score and hence, Edu-WUDI was designed to derive performance and behavioural insights based on all parameters in an educational ecosystem with the aim of empowering children to follow the career that they are not only innately good at, but also one that they would love do.
“With Edu-WUDI we wanted to create a platform where we could create a databank of information for each child, analyse it and get insights from it. Data of the student like marks, attendance, library data – like what books you read- etc is compiled by the AI bot and this, in turn, creates patterns and shows you exactly what the child is passionate about and what he/she is good at.” Arjun says. WUDI is created as a plug-and-play AI that can be incorporated into the existing systems of an educational institution. “When it came down to acquiring this information we thought let’s not disturb the system but rather let’s be an independent system that is interfaced with the school network to get all of the data we require.”
Once the AI system was in place drawing information from within a school’s database, the siblings realized that there were three major groups of individuals whose feedback would be required to better aid in WUDI’s functioning. “There are three groups of people who serve as the biggest influencers in the lives of students – parents, teachers and peers – all of whom have a significant role to play and who can provide significant insights into the various students based on interpersonal and observational knowledge. For example, the English teacher knows exactly which students excel in prose and who excels in poetry – this information is something others might not be privy to. Therefore we thought it was necessary to create an option of allowing for feedback those three groups of people to further help bolster our analysis of each student. With all of this information within, the system can actually predict the ideal path one ought to take in terms of a career or profession.”
WUDI is currently being given out as a free application since its creators believe that the data they receive from schools (at least in the initial phases of development) would be used to enhance the algorithms of the AI system. “The data we receive from the schools that host WUDI is worth more than money to us. As long as we have no data the entire system goes for a toss. Therefore the more data and the more schools we connect to, the more the system learns and enhances itself to a point where it becomes self-sufficient/self-reliant.”
Also, WUDI serves as a crowdsourced information system that will allow other schools to get a peek into what other teachers, parents and students have shared their feedback about. For example, if a school was interested in purchasing a certain book in their library the WUDI database would give them an idea of the kind of feedback from students regarding the book, the age group of students who had read the book and other such useful information that would help the institution. “The information is not being shared and we are assuring information security and you will not get specific details of other schools but it will only serve as a tool to help other institutions.”
Edu-WUDI is currently in its pilot phase and is functioning in two schools in the state with a database of around 10.000 students but intends to soon branch out and spread its reach further within the next few years. “For our pilot phase, we chose CBSE schools that are more structured and have a system in place that links all of their functions. These schools are already in possession of a database, which though unstructured, would be immense use to us. We chose these schools depending on whether they would properly implement the system, use it and understand its purpose.”
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