IR-290: Capstone: Deploy an AI-Enhanced Search System

Course Description

The capstone course for the Certificate in AI-Powered Search. Students design and deploy a complete AI-enhanced search system for a real or realistic content corpus. Requirements: query expansion (LLM-based), semantic reranking (cross-encoder), and AI overview generation. Students choose their stack: Scolta on Drupal/WordPress, Elasticsearch + LLM layer, or a custom build. Final deliverable: a working system with evaluation report comparing baseline BM25 search against the AI-enhanced system on a curated query set.