Week #1: Back to the Drawing Board

1. New Challenge, New Topics, New Ideas

A new challenge, a new set of course units and, along with them, new topics to cover.

For this challenge, the course units that will accompany it will be Machine Learning II and Natural Language and Conversational Systems.

The former, as the name suggests, will pick up where Machine Learning I left off, this time with a bigger focus on Deep Learning and Big Data, all the way from different neural network architectures and applications to the tools and techniques used while handling Big Data.

The latter course unit, as the name suggests, will cover topics about Natural Language Processing (NLP) and its applications in our day to day, ranging from text translation to conversational systems (e.g. chat bots).

When the time came to think of ideas for this new challenge, a very natural one came to mind: a digital sales assistant.

In previous challenges, the team frequently found articles identifying the personalisation of the retail experience as the key limitation of e-commerce when compared to physical retail, with shopping assistance being a perfect example of this.

A person that goes to a physical clothing store is usually greeted and offered help by a sales assistant, providing the client with the best shopping experience and with least possible effort. In e-commerce platforms, the closest feature to this are recommendation systems, but they're not quite the same, as they lack the accessibility and human factor of sales assistants.

As such, for the following weeks, the team proposes the development of a digital sales assistant that can easily be integrated in any e-commerce platform, allowing clients to effortlessly find the product they need, through a natural conversation with a a human-like chat bot, shortening the existing gap between e-commerce and physical retail.