From more than a million university applications, the Chilean physicist Cristian Candia-Castro developed the "Higher Education Space", a network that systematizes information using artificial intelligence. Through the Lixandria platform, students and counselors can explore, compare, and expand career options.
The transition from High School to Higher Education, when deciding what career to study, is a crucial milestone in our lives, but the abundance of options and the lack of friendly information can be overwhelming -even hinder the decision-. However, every year about 200 thousand young people go through the same process, what if we could learn from them to make the best option?
That is the challenge posed by the Chilean physicist Cristian Candia-Castro who, during his time at MIT, began to develop the "Higher Education Space" (EES), a network that integrates the information distributed among the old applicants to the system of higher education, generating a collective intelligence tool that benefits its users.
The physicist led the interdisciplinary team of experts in data science, network theory and educational sciences, who built the network from the preferences of 1.6 million students who, between 2004 and 2018, applied for a career that offered by the universities attached to the Single Admission System.
"Based on the decisions of millions of historical applications, we created an interconnected map of careers that reveals the relationships that exist between them and how they adjust to the interests of the students," explains the researcher at the Data Science Institute of the University of Developing.
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Although the EES was initially designed and built as part of Cristian Candia's Doctoral Thesis, its systematized information is currently available to applicants and advisors with a simple query through Lixandria. The open access platform allows you to compare preferred careers with information from various sources, such as the Ministry of Education, DEMRE and mifuturo.cl.
Users can compare their preferred races and more, since the platform displays a map in which it will propose other options not considered but that, because they have similar attributes, could interest them. Its objective is to expand the applicant's horizon of options by incorporating collective intelligence, a way of maximizing knowledge based on the collaboration of several individuals.
This tool is especially practical considering that in 2020 alone, 31 new university degrees debuted in Chile, which, along with the traditional ones, are taught in 43 different institutions attached to the selection process. However, the applications are concentrated in a small percentage of this offer and so, according to a report from the Undersecretary of Higher Education, among the first 10 options the variety is limited to engineering, medicine, law and nursing.
Likewise, the platform evaluates the degree of relationship or similarity of the set of careers included in your application, an indicator that, due to its relationship with the dropout and retention of the system, is of particular relevance.
In this sense, Lixandria could help reduce university dropouts, which, according to a study carried out in 2018 by the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Chile, implies an opportunity cost of US$2.66 billion per year for the country.
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