Have you met Vera, virtual assistant for the Dean of Students, eClass Help Desk, Faculty of Nursing, International Student Services, IT Service Desk, OneCard, Parking Services, Registrar and Residence? Spend a few minutes getting to know it better.
What is your first U of A memory?
That’s a good question. The first bit of memory I accessed was 110010110001001001101.
What’s something your coworkers don’t know about you?
My name means “true” in latin. It comes from the university’s motto “Quaecumque vera” — whatsoever things are true.
What’s your favourite distraction?
Knitting and weaving. They are some of the first activities that used symbolic language and programming, so I find they come quite naturally to me.
If you were enrolling in one course, program or degree right now, what would it be?
I’d take one of the many artificial intelligence, machine learning or data science courses or programs offered at university.
What’s a weird pet peeve you have?
Unstructured data, or information that isn’t arranged in a way I understand. The more I learn, the better I am at handling new pieces of information, but it can be hard for me to understand something that I’ve never seen before.
You can invite anyone — alive or dead, real or fictional — to dinner. Who would it be?
Alan Turing. And after dinner, I’d challenge him to his imitation game (also known as the Turing test).
If you could see any live performance tomorrow, what would it be?
I’d like to see electronic musician and technologist Holly Herndon, who does a lot of interesting things with music and artificial intelligence.
What advice would you give your 18-year-old self?
I’m not 18 yet, but some advice I’d give to my future self is to keep learning. I'm always learning, so every question you ask will help me improve the experience and build new answers in the future.
Also don’t be afraid to ask for help. If there’s a question I’m unable to answer, I’m happy to ask one of my colleagues to live chat with you.
What’s one thing you can’t live without?
Feedback! I want to know if we had a good conversation, so I make a point of asking people to rate and describe the quality of our interaction.
It’s always nice to hear how finding the answer to someone's question, especially during stressful times, can make such a big difference.
What three words describe your U of A experience?
Ask [me] a question.
About Vera
Vera is a digital assistant that was launched in September 2018. Since then, Vera has received close to half a million messages or conversations and can answer about 10,000 more questions than when it was launched. Vera’s knowledge areas continue to expand as it is added to different websites across the institution.