Deakin University wins award for AI assistant

Deakin University has taken out the award for best education IT project of the year at iTnews' 2018 Benchmark Awards for its Genie virtual assistant.

The intelligent assistant uses a mix of proprietary, open source, and vendor technologies alongside integrations into Deakin's core systems to create a platform that serves as a student's personal assistant.

It is intended to provide students everything they need for campus life, whether that's a prompt to study or exercise more, or a pointer to where they can locate learning materials.

Just months after officially going live, the university is already fielding requests from other organisations for the technology.

Deakin CDO William Confalonieri has been given permission to start the engines on commercialisation.

"Thank you very much, I am really humbled for this award. Truly I believe [the team] shaped the award," Confalonieri said.

"We all know that we can do little without the work of our team or without the context our organisation provides to us to do those things. But certainly the talent of our team [means] we can achieve anything."

You can read more about Deakin University's work alongside the other winning projects in the iTnews Benchmark Awards 2018 special edition report.

Winners were announced at the iTnews Benchmark Awards held as part of Adapt Ventures' CIO Edge Experience at the Grand Hyatt Melbourne.