Dear colleagues, our team is working on development of a cloud-based AI powered research assistant to be trained on the literature in your specific field and to become a companion and SME aiding your literature review, gap identification, formulation of research problems, questions and hypotheses, and terminology and term definition management. Using a MS Word plugin, it will also be capable to assist with the academic writing process (form & style). The application will learn from interactions with the user and will proactively search the online sources for relevant new literature to boost your research by doing more, discovering more, achieving more by augmenting research capabilities and by removing tedious manual tasks. We also work on integrating it with Zotero, GoogleScholar, and online library repositories.
We will start a crowdsourcing campaign to help finance development of this application designed exclusively for academic researchers and students after completing a feasibility study and development of a working prototype.
Would this be of interest to you personally and what recommendations would you have for the development team?
Thank you for your help!
Since I suppose you will use Generative AI (ChatGPT or something similar), please be aware that sometimes ChatGPT provides non-existing quotes and articles - i.e. quotes words that a given author never said, or articles he/she never wrote.
I guess this will be one of the hardest challenges for your development team. I advice to adopt some open source library so that you have better chances try to tackle this issue.
Good luck :)
Thank you Alessandro. We are indeed planning to use the OpenAI ChatGPT API, but will parametrize the bot to follow scientific methodology and only use the actual text from the literature the bot will be trained on. Athena will have a database of term definitions and an ability to build meta-analyses to provide insights into the status of a particular field, the research trends and gaps. Through its machine learning capability, it will also learn through the interaction with the researcher. We are currently building the technology architecture with the team, so your input is very useful indeed! Thank you again for contributing to this discussion. Jiri
This sounds like a fantastic resource for students. I want to try this during beta testing! Very interested in gap identification.
I use Google Scholar, Zotero, and many other research libraries. I search for ways that make the research process more organized and accessible to my saved articles quickly, as well as help with citing and bibliographies.
I love the quick access to Zotero and the libraries I can create to organize my research.
I have never used anything like ChatGPT- I haven't even tried it out. Should I question my sanity as an IT student? lol
Maybe one idea would be to add something that can clarify a long piece of writing into a more condensed summary so that students don't have to read the entire article unless necessary.
Very excited about this.
Is this in the beginning process, or have you guys posted about this on a website? I would love to read more about the idea and what to expect!
Good luck!
Thank you Amber for your reply! Athena will have integration with Google Scholar and Zotero to locate literature and help manage the references and citations, but the core functionality will be in heuristic analysis of the text, exploration of the theoretical landscape, and assistance with the direction of the research in conversational AI interface. Athena will summarize literature for you, manage theories and defintions, and will answer any questions you may have about the theory or the research process. We are working on the website and I will get back to you about the beta testing, we will be very happy to get your initial feedback! All the best, Jiri
This project has now been closed. During the feasibility study, we concluded that the current version of ChatGPT is not ready to be trained to become a research assistant. The levels of errors and fabrications far exceeded an acceptable level, making it an unreliable tool for researchers. We also detected strong skepticism among the members of the research focus group and concern about the tool's potential misuse for plagiarism.
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