Project Overview

We are a team of Imperial College Students committed to improving campus life through innovative multi-agent solutions. CampusSphere leverages Microsoft Azure AI capabilities to automate core university campus services.

We created an end-to-end solution that allows both students and staff to access a multi-agent framework for room/gym booking, attendance tracking, calendar management, IoT monitoring and more.

🔭 Our Initial Vision: Reimagining Campus Technology

When our team at Imperial College London embarked on the CampusSphere project as part of Microsoft’s Agentic Campus initiative, we had one clear ambition: to create an intelligent campus ecosystem that would fundamentally change how students, faculty, and staff interact with university services.

The inspiration came from a simple observation—despite living in an age of advanced AI, campus technology remained frustratingly fragmented. Students juggled multiple portals for course registration, room booking, dining services, and academic support. Faculty members navigated separate systems for teaching, research, and administrative tasks. The result? Countless hours wasted on mundane navigation tasks that could be better spent on learning, teaching, and innovation.

Our vision was ambitious: create a single, intelligent interface that could understand natural language, anticipate user needs, and seamlessly integrate with existing campus infrastructure. We didn’t just want to build another campus app—we wanted to demonstrate how Microsoft’s agentic AI technologies could create a truly intelligent campus companion.

🧠 Enter CampusSphere

CampusSphere is an intelligent campus assistant made up of multiple AI agents, each with a specific domain of expertise — all communicating seamlessly through a centralized architecture.

Think of it as a digital concierge for campus life, where your calendar, attendance, IoT data, and facility bookings are coordinated by specialized GPT-powered agents.

Here’s what we built:

• TriageAgent – the brain of the system, using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to understand user intent


• CalendarAgent – handles scheduling, bookings, and reminders


• AttendanceAgent – tracks check-ins automatically


• IoTAgent – monitors real-time sensor data from classrooms and labs


• GymAgent – manages access and reservations for sports facilities


• 30+ MCP Tools – perform SQL queries, scrape web data, and connect with external APIs

All of this is built on Microsoft Azure AI, Semantic Kernel, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) — making it scalable, secure, and lightning fast.

🖥️ The Tech Stack

Our Azure-powered architecture showcases a modular and scalable approach to real-time data processing and intelligent agent coordination. The frontend is built using React with a Vite development server, providing a fast and responsive user interface. When users submit a prompt, it travels to a Flask backend server acting as the Triage agent, which intelligently delegates tasks to a FastAPI agent service.

This FastAPI service asynchronously communicates with individual agents and handles responses efficiently. Complex queries are routed to MCP Tools, which interact with the CosmosDB-powered Campus Database. Simultaneously, real-time synthetic IoT data is pushed into the database via Azure Function Apps and Azure IoT Hub.

Authentication is securely managed: users log in through the frontend, receive a token from the database API server, and use it for authorized access to MCP services, with permissions enforced based on user roles using our custom MCP server implementation. This robust architecture enables seamless integration, real-time data flow, and secure multi-agent collaboration across Azure services.

Our system leverages a multi-agent architecture designed to intelligently coordinate task execution across specialized services. At the core is the TriageAgent, which uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to interpret user prompts, enrich them with relevant context, and determine the optimal response path. Based on the nature of the request, it may handle the response directly, seek clarification, or delegate tasks to specific agents via FastAPI.

Each specialized agent has a clearly defined role:

• AttendanceAgent: Interfaces with CosmosDB-backed FastAPI endpoints to check student attendance, using filters like event name, student ID, or date.
  
  


• IoTAgent: Monitors room conditions (e.g., temperature, CO₂ levels) and flags anomalies using real-time data from Azure IoT Hub, processed via FastAPI.
  
  


• CalendarAgent: Handles scheduling, availability checks, and event creation by querying or updating CosmosDB through FastAPI. Future integration with Microsoft Graph API is planned for direct calendar syncing.
  
  


• Gym Slot Agent: Checks available times for gym sessions using dedicated MCP tools.
  
  

The triage agent serves as the orchestrator, breaking down complex requests (like “Book a gym session”) into subtasks. It consults relevant agents (e.g., calendar and gym slot agents), merges results, and then confirms the final action with the user. This distributed and asynchronous workflow reduces backend load and enhances both responsiveness and reliability of the system.

🔮 What’s Next?

Integrating CampusSphere with live systems via Microsoft OAuth is crucial for enhancing its capabilities. This integration will grant the agent authenticated access to a wider range of student data, moving beyond synthetic datasets. This expanded access to real-world information will enable deeply personalized advice, such as tailored course selection, scholarship recommendations, event suggestions, and deadline reminders, transforming CampusSphere into a sophisticated, proactive personal assistant.

🤝Meet the Team Behind CampusSphere

Our success stemmed from a diverse team of innovators who brought together expertise from multiple domains:

Benny Liu – https://www.linkedin.com/in/zong-benny-liu-393a4621b/ 

Lucas Ng – https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-ng-11b317203/ 

Lu Ju – https://www.linkedin.com/in/lu-ju/ 

Bruno Duaso – https://www.linkedin.com/in/bruno-duaso-jimeno-744464262/ 

Martim Coutinho – https://www.linkedin.com/in/martim-pereira-coutinho-116308233/ 

Krischad Pourpongpan – https://www.linkedin.com/in/krischadpua/ 

Yixu Pan – https://www.linkedin.com/in/yixu-pan/ 

Our collaborative approach enabled us to create a sophisticated agentic AI system that demonstrates the powerful potential of Microsoft’s AI technologies in educational environments.

🧑‍💻 Project Repository:

GitHub – Imperial-Microsoft-Agentic-Campus/CampusSphere

Contribute to Imperial-Microsoft-Agentic-Campus/CampusSphere development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Have questions about implementing similar solutions at your institution? Connect with our team members on LinkedIn—we’re always excited to share knowledge and collaborate on innovative campus technology projects.

📚Get Started with Microsoft’s AI Tools

Ready to explore the technologies that made CampusSphere possible? Here are essential resources:

Microsoft Semantic Kernel: The core framework for building AI agent orchestration systems. Learn how to create, coordinate, and manage multiple AI agents working together seamlessly.

AI Agents for Beginners: A comprehensive guide to understanding and building AI agents from the ground up. Perfect for getting started with agentic AI development.

Model Context Protocol (MCP): Learn about the protocol that enables secure connections between AI models and external tools and services—essential for building integrated AI systems.

Windows AI Toolkit: Microsoft’s toolkit for developing AI applications on Windows, providing local AI model development capabilities and deployment tools.

Azure Container Apps: Understand how to deploy and scale containerized AI applications in the cloud, perfect for hosting multi-agent systems.

Azure Cosmos DB Security: Essential security practices for managing data in AI applications, covering encryption, access control, and compliance.