In this course on robotic process automation (RPA), students in any industry will learn to automate some of the simple, repetitive software tasks encountered by general office workers, managers, and information workers. They will learn to automate transaction processings, data manipulation, digital systems communication, and alerts that trigger a response requiring limited cognitive intelligence.
Students will discover the remarkable abilities of RPA using MiniWob++ tasks, a library environment of web-browser-based navigation and interaction tasks for computer control. We'll cover:
- Simple button clicking
- Complex form-filling
- Dragging actions
- Booking systems
- Email app navigation
Throughout the course, we’ll delve into the intricacies of various MiniWob++ tasks and examine our agent's performance in detail. We’ll highlight tasks where our agent excels and tasks where humans outperform our agent. While we investigate the challenges posed by specific tasks, such as Simon-says and terminal, we’ll shed light on the factors contributing to our agent's performance disparities compared to humans.
We’ll also survey research and advancements in achieving human-level performance in MiniWob++ RPA tasks; the strategies, techniques, and architectural choices that enable agents to achieve exceptional results; and uncover the challenges and opportunities in the field of RPA
Learning Outcomes
At the conclusion of this course, students will be able to:
- Describe RPA, their strengths and limitations
- Learn AI intelligence applied to RPAs
- Evaluate the performance of our agent on MiniWob++ tasks by comparing it to what is in previous literature and establishing a state-of-the-art benchmark.
- Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of our agent in different MiniWob++ tasks, identifying areas where it excels and where humans outperform it.
- Investigate the challenges posed by specific tasks and identify the factors contributing to performance disparities between our agent and humans.
- Discuss cutting-edge research, advancements, and architectural choices in achieving human-level performance in computer control.
- Design, utilize and evaluate RPA agents for human-level performance in general and simple tasks.
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