Aalosakan : A student advisory guide system Sarveswaran Kenkatharaiyar, Arththika Paramanathan, Shakila Sivagnanarajah Department of Computer Science, Faculty

of Science, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. Introduction Students in Sri Lanka look for carrier paths soon after the Ordinary Level examination and Advanced Level examination. Most of the time advises have been obtained from their siblings, friends, relatives and teachers. However, it will be hard to proof that the suggestions acquired from them are neutral as those can be arisen from personal agenda. Further, through news paper advertisements commercial institutions propose carrier paths based on their capacity and businesses. In addition to that the students who have sat for Advanced Level examination will get disconnected from schools and teacher community. Therefore the students always face difficulties in getting appropriate information on their carrier paths. The system which has been proposed here will provide suitable carrier directions to students, specifically to students who would like to progress in the Information Technology area, through the web and mobile. The proposed system enables students who are even in very remote villages, without the Internet access, to get the guidance through basic mobile phones which work using Global System for Mobile (GSM) communication technology. This knowledge based system will help students who have difficulties in asking advices from people due to various personal reasons. Further system also facilitates job seekers to find jobs and companies to publish jobs. Background and objective There are no reportable work has been published in mobile based carrier guidance. There is a Telco [5] has implemented a system to provide carrier guidance in India. There is a web based information portal for carrier guidance for ordinary level secondary school students in Uganda [1]. There is a CGI-executable of the AI CLIPS software was used in the portal. Export(II) is an expert system model of artificial intelligence that simulates the carrier counseling process for high school students [2]. Objective of this work is to develop a system that can help students to choose suitable carrier paths via mobile phone and web portal using a table of knowledge. Methodology and Implementation We have implemented this system to give an unbiased and efficient guidance for students in a low cost, promote courses of institutes very easily and reduce expenses of using web based guidance. The Web part developed offers the user a broad array of information, arranged in a way which is most convenient for the user to access. The apache web server was used to host the web portal. The central engine was written entirely in PHP and the GUI is a simple HTML web interface and

JAVA SCRIPT is used for scripting purposes. The content management depends on a MySQL backend database. Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) [4] is a protocol used by GSM cellular telephones to communicate with the service providers computers. It is used to access this system via mobile. This facilitates the users to access this system without any barriers. Mobile users can get this service with a service code and can access by selecting menu options one by one. Same MySQL backend database is used for both web & mobile applications. User groups and functionalities.

Our web and mobile portel.

DataBase MySQL

Results Now we implemented a part of the system as web and mobile application for A/L students, which included course selection for a specific subject stream, jobs for courses and companies for jobs. Users could move step by step by selecting from given options as it hadnt integrated with an AI engine yet. We input the details of the courses, jobs, and institutes to build our knowledgebase. This system retrieves suitable results for users from this knowledge base. Students and institutes can use our system via web through the link [6] and as a mobile application via one of the leading mobile service providers through this service code #771*759#. Conclusion As a proof of concept, we are trying to develop as a table based or look up based knowledge base and then we will replace that with an AI engine. Users are anonymous and independent so they feel very comfortable while using this system. And they receive consistent information because the system does not get tired or careless and will be available in any time anywhere. This system can be used in remote locations. This system provides reliable and unbiased solutions forever. Future work Instead of using a table of knowledge, an expert system is expected to be integrated so that the system may become more flexible and it will try to respond to new unseen queries as well. Also in future it has been planned to integrate the local language support so that people who do not know English also can be benefited through the proposed system. References [1] Balirwa moses (2006) An information portal for carrer guidance: The case of ordinary level in Uganda. [2] Janet B.Parks An artificial intelligence sport management carrer guidance system. [3] http://www.sliit.lk/index.php/content-joomla-default/101-front-page-news/1401-sliit-andexetel-introduce-ai-based-helpdesk-customer-support-system.html [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Service_Data [5] http://www.airtel.in/education-files/carrer-and-job.html [6] https://ec2-184-73-49-246.compute-1.amazonaws.com/aalosakan [7] http://aalosaka.blogspot.com