Category: Research
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Claude, give me feedback on my research proposal
Comments from a postgraduate student who used Claude to get feedback on a research proposal draft. Even though the student didn’t have a paid account, the response from Claude was still very useful. It commented on the proposed title, structure, sentence length, logic and flow of ideas. It recommended explaining terms and pointed to relevant…
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Generative AI for research – Stellenbosch University physiotherapy division
Generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Claude are rapidly improving next-word predictors capable of generating multimodal content. They share similarities with humans, including biases and hallucinations. Treating GenAI as an expert research assistant for idea generation, literature review, writing, and data analysis requires critical evaluation of outputs.
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BIP AI – AI in research: Opportunities and challenges
In this Blended Intensive Programme on AI, Guillem Jabardo and I explore the potential of generative AI to support all stages of the research process. However, while extremely powerful, these tools still have limitations, necessitating critical review. The ability of generative AI to augment human cognition represents a paradigm shift for academia.
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Podcast – Breaking Boundaries: Democratizing Scientific Knowledge Using AI
https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/breaking-boundaries-democratizing-scientific-knowledge-using-ai-with-gabe-gomes-of-coscientist/ Gabe Gomes, Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, discusses Democratizing Scientific Knowledge using AI. They talk about Coscientist, the first non-organic, intelligent being to design, plan, and execute a chemistry experiment. They explore the benefits and concerns of using AI in science, the potential of AI in generating synthesis protocols, the value of automation…
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Chatbot Responses to Patient Questions
Ayers, J. W., et al. (2023). Comparing Physician and Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Responses to Patient Questions Posted to a Public Social Media Forum. JAMA Internal Medicine. In this cross-sectional study within the context of patient questions in a public online forum, chatbot responses were longer than physician responses, and the study’s health care professional evaluators…
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Semantic Reader for intelligent skimming of academic papers
Semantic Reader is an “AI-powered augmented scientific reading application”. The problem that Semantic Reader aims to address are the “…many points of friction that break the flow of comprehension when reading technical papers:” “Semantic Reader uses artificial intelligence to understand a document’s structure and merge it with the Semantic Scholar’s academic corpus, providing detailed information…
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A trilogy of posts on using AI for academic articles
Earlier today I published a short series of posts on some ideas I had for using language models (e.g. ChatGPT and Claude) to help support academic writing. I didn’t plan to write a series of posts. I initially had the idea to test Claude’s capability as a peer reviewer, and as I was finishing up…
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Journals should be experimenting with LLMs in their editorial workflow
I recently wrote a post about using Claude to peer review an academic paper, and the decent job it did. Based on that experience, I started thinking about the probable impact on journal editorial workflows, a significant part of which is the peer review process. If I was still on an editorial board of a…
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Claude, you are an expert peer-reviewer…
I recently completed a peer review for an academic journal, and as I was submitting it I wondered how Claude would perform if given the task. Since the article was anonymised, I didn’t think there’d be any problems uploading the PDF and asking Claude to review it. And, I had already submitted my review so…
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AI for research – University of the Western Cape research week
I was invited to give the opening address at the University of the Western Cape’s research week, where I talked about the use of large language models in academia and research. I highlighted the use of generative AI applications for tasks like literature reviews and idea generation, despite limitations like biases and a lack of…
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Research: Meta’s latest AI model makes scientific PDFs machine-readable
Meta’s latest AI model makes scientific PDFs machine-readable https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13418 Scientific knowledge is predominantly stored in books and scientific journals, often in the form of PDFs. However, the PDF format leads to a loss of semantic information, particularly for mathematical expressions. We propose Nougat (Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents), a Visual Transformer model that performs…
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Conference: AMEE 2023 in Glasgow
I’ll be attending the AMEE 2023 conference in Glasgow from 27-30 Aug. I’ll be posting my thoughts and notes at this stream over the course of the conference, and I’ll share a few summaries afterwards as well. I’m really looking forward to this conference, in a way that I haven’t felt for a long time.…
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Resource: Wikipedia Library
I recently made my 500th edit to a Wikimedia project, and unlocked access to the Wikipedia Library (see above), which I didn’t even know existed. The library is a collection of paywalled resources that are made available in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation. If your institution doesn’t have access to these resources, or you don’t…
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Use language models to explore a space of possibilities
Strong E, DiGiammarino A, Weng Y, et al. Chatbot vs Medical Student Performance on Free-Response Clinical Reasoning Examinations. JAMA Intern Med. Published online July 17, 2023. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.2909 A popular chatbot is an interface for the generative pretrained transformer (GPT) large language model artificial intelligence (AI) system that generates humanlike text in response to user input.…
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Article: CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access research and large language models for credible, trustworthy question answering
Pride, D., Cancellieri, M., & Knoth, P. (2023). CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access research and large language models for credible, trustworthy question answering (arXiv:2307.04683). arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2307.04683 In this paper, we present CORE-GPT, a novel question answering platform that combines GPT-based language models and more than 32 million full-text open access scientific articles from CORE. We first…
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Generative AI for researchers
Generative AI for researchers I’ve been collecting some bits and pieces on the use of generative AI for researchers, and thought I’d share a few resources that you may find useful. Blog posts about using AI for research AI tools for research (note that these are only the ones I’ve played around with a bit…there are…
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How I used to get an overview of a new topic, compared to using ChatGPT
The other day I was in a meeting where participants were talking about different routes our institution offers towards a PhD, and I realised that I didn’t have a strong sense of the differences, and relative merits of each route. What I would usually do in a situation like this is something like the following:…
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Rejected AMEE abstract (oral presentation) | Is ‘being human’ enough? Preparing for clinical practice in the age of artificial intelligence
See this brief post on my reasons for sharing rejections. Introduction Identity is central to our understanding of the health professions, and much of professionaleducation revolves around this core value. The introduction of artificially intelligent tools (AI-based systems) into clinical practice has led to resistance in the face of perceived threats to clinician autonomy (Jussupow…
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The seductive appeal of measuring outcomes in edtech research – SAAHE SIG webinar
In this SAAHE webinar, I discuss the limitations of comparative study designs in education technology research, which often fail to control for confounding variables and focus too much on specific outcomes. Instead, I propose decoupling teaching from learning, suggesting that research should consider whether observed student behaviours align with established good learning practices, rather than…
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Why publish-or-perish? Why not, publish-and-prosper?
It’s weird to think of some of the things we take for granted in higher education. Surely one of the worst is to be taken in by the publish-or-perish mindset; the idea that, unless you publish you have no future in academia. That you’ll be punished, or worse, that you’ll ‘perish’: To die or be destroyed, especially…