Students at the University of Nebraska’s Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science presented their projects at a Design Studio Showcase on Friday.
Many of the teams focused on financial or agricultural solutions, but one group chose to focus on fashion-forward thinking.
The four Raikes students worked together to create a chatbot app for The Buckle, a Nebraska-based fashion retailer with stores in 42 states. It allows shoppers to use more casual language to find the perfect piece of clothing.
Ealynn Hsu, a senior computer science and piano performance major, worked as the product manager for the team. She said the group wanted to make the search process easier for someone shopping online to describe what they had in mind.
“Let's say you're looking for professional wear, it won't bring up all products that are relevant to your search. You might get anything with the word professional in the title of the product or the description,” Hsu said. “Getting that perfect product that you're looking for can be really difficult with the systems that exist, so our project is trying to kind of bridge that gap with natural language search, making it easier to find the products you're looking for.”
Victoria Chin, a senior computer science major, worked as the development manager for the project. She said she hadn’t thought of AI as a solution until the group put their heads together, and tackling AI technology was a rewarding challenge.
“That involved looking into different LLM, large language models, tools such as ChatGPT or Claude, things like that, to help us develop description words that power our recommendation model,” Chin said. “None of us have experience building a kind of chatbot app, so just having to learn each of these new tools was a bit of a challenge initially, but we all got to learn a lot from it.”
Chin and Hsu worked with developers and fellow Raikes students, Radhika Damle, junior actuarial science and data science major, and Katia Henrriquez, a junior software engineering major from Omaha, to earn the Design Studio Showcase’s top honor: a platinum award.
Nancy Heyne, program lead at the Raikes School Design Studio, said the studio is important to provide students with the opportunity to engage with Nebraska-based companies and come up with practical solutions.
“It's a pretty big ask for a group of students, but they are amazing, and the things they come up with are really cool,” Heyne said. “They are showing the fruits of their labors.”