The problem
You are travelling from St Kitts to Nevis. You want the ferry schedule, or the port tariff, or what it will cost to clear your cargo. So you call the St Christopher Air & Sea Ports Authority (SCASPA). And you wait. Then you wait some more. The published brief put it plainly — every plane, ship and cruise passenger, and the phones never stop.
SCASPA is the St Christopher Air and Sea Ports Authority: the machinery that moves everything and everyone between two islands. Ferries, cargo, cruise passengers, and the airport that carries whatever does not go by sea.
The published brief did not describe a technology problem. It described a telephone that never stops ringing — and behind each of those calls, someone standing at a terminal without the one piece of information they needed before they left home.
What they built
A 24/7 self-service guide over verified SCASPA data: inter-island ferry schedules, maritime tariffs, cargo clearance documentation and Robert L. Bradshaw International Airport logistics. Every factual claim carries a Sources panel showing where it came from and the date it was last checked, and the interface says plainly that information is a snapshot rather than a live feed. Anything touching security or customs clearance is handed to an on-duty port dispatcher rather than answered.
- 1.04s
- verification time
- 4
- operations covered
- 2
- sources shown
- Dispatcher
- handoff
knowledge-base search behind a live answer
vessels, flights, tariffs and cargo
per factual claim, each with a checked date
for anything needing security or customs clearance
Built with
- Python
- RAG
- Dispatcher handoff
The team
- Josiah Benjamin — Group Lead, Coder
- Nahamani Carey — Designer, Presenter
- Jernyah Mills — Presenter, Designer
- Saidee Jack — Coder, Research
A port is a lifeline, not a help desk — and the bot's job is to answer instantly while knowing exactly when to pass a traveller to a human.
Editorial review
Our reading of the build
An independent assessment by the editors of this publication — not the judges’ scoring, and not the team’s own account.
- Craft
- PILOT is the most disciplined build in the field about what it does not know. The Sources panel is not decoration — it carries the claim, the origin and the date it was last checked, and the interface states outright that a date is when a fact was verified rather than a guarantee it is still true. A team that ships information is a snapshot, not a live feed on the screen has understood something about public-sector data that a lot of production software still has not.
- What they learnt, and where it shows
- The Golden Record is the whole chapter here. Topic, question, hard fact, source, last verified — the teaching artefact and the shipped interface are close to the same object. The handoff discipline comes from the same place: security and customs questions are not answered badly, they are not answered at all, which is the authority-classification lesson enforced as a rule rather than a hope.
- Usability
- Showing the tool call — the knowledge-base search, timed — turns a loading state into an explanation, and it is the reason a sceptical traveller might believe the answer. The tension is that the Sources panel occupies roughly a third of the screen for a product whose users are frequently standing at a terminal on a phone. What reassures a judge in a hall may crowd the person it was built for.
- Scalability
- The dispatcher handoff is the honest constraint: it scales exactly as far as there is a dispatcher on duty, so out-of-hours the bot's most important capability is the one that stops working. The demonstration also ran on sample data drawn from a test fixture, and the interface said so — creditable in a presentation, but it means the live data path is the piece still to be proven. The domain coverage, though, is unusually well-bounded, and a well-bounded scope is the easiest kind to keep accurate.
Images captured at the 2026 ECCU Chatbot & Multimedia Showcase, 28 August 2026. Screen captures have been cropped to remove browser and streaming interface; the chatbot interfaces and the presenters are unaltered.