Undergrad Sci-Tech Students Develop Chatbots for Microsoft-Owned Platform GitHub

Students in the Bachelor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (BCSAI) built chatbots and recommendation systems to enhance the GitHub experience, a leading Microsoft-owned platform used by developers to collaborate on software development projects.

Given IE School of Science and Technology’s mission to innovate STEM education, the projects’ evaluation criteria followed Microsoft’s own standards, mirroring the professional work environment, with one group actually selected to present their work directly to the tech giant.

“The way I evaluated the project was based on my experience at Microsoft. In terms of project quality, I evaluated the project based on technical details,” said Miguel González-Fierro, Principal Data Scientist Manager at Microsoft Spain and the professor who organized the activity for his class.

He applied the same rigor to his students as he would at work.

“For the individual evaluation, I did the exact same procedure that we have at Microsoft. We call it the three-circles evaluation: individual contributions, contributions on top of the work of others, and help to others.”

One group’s project – CodeCompass particularly impressed González-Fierro as they built a solution combining both a recommendation engine and a chatbot where users receive personalized recommendations for code repositories which they could later chat with. 

“We first do this by providing personalized recommendations of code repositories for a specific user. From there, we implemented the chatbot which allows users to talk with the repositories to gain a deeper understanding of it [code, commits, keywords],” said BCSAI student Gabriel de Olaguibel. “By combining the two, we allow users to discover relevant code that might interest them and then dive deeper into it by using our chatbot to learn about it.”

Having presented CodeCompass to his colleagues at Microsoft, they now want to meet the students and have them share their project. In addition to de Olaguibel, the six-member team includes: Maud Helen Hovland, Keti Sulamanidze, Félix Gómez Guillamón, Luca Cuneo and Miranda Drummond.

Luca Cuneo, BCSAI student and member of CodeCompass said meeting with Microsoft professionals enables the group to receive top-notch feedback on managing projects.

“It would be an amazing opportunity to be able to show the project to the GitHub and Microsoft people,” he said. “It gives us an amazing opportunity to get feedback from multiple professionals on how to tackle projects like this in the future, it might lead to new ideas for many other future projects, and that is thrilling.”

Gabriel de Olaguibel highlighted how imitating Microsoft’s real working environment pushed the group to excel in completing their project.

 “By following a development process similar to big tech companies like Microsoft, we were able to effectively divide and conquer the project by having team members take various engineering roles and splitting the development into phases,” he said.

IE School of Science and Technology designs its programs to integrate hands-on-projects that address today’s most pressing issues. Other class project examples had students in the Bachelor of Applied Mathematics testing ChatGPT’s knowledge gaps, as well as students in the Bachelor of Environmental Sciences for Sustainability visiting the Rio Tinto Mining District to learn about acid mine drainages.

“We learnt to adapt and while we were no experts in anything - recommendation systems or chatbots at the start, we figured things out on our own and with the professor’s guidance to best deliver a product,” Cuneo said.