Tag: research
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My book on scholarship as a commons
We face increasingly complex challenges yet have made systematic thinking tools exclusive to academic institutions. This creates artificial scarcity when we need broader intellectual engagement. Scholarship should function as intellectual commons—shared infrastructure enabling thoughtful navigation of uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity for everyone, not just credentialed experts. This book explores what that might look like.
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What does a ‘lecturer’ do?
This infographic shows the diverse roles of a typical lecturer, spanning responsibilities across teaching, research, and service. The balance between these areas varies, highlighting the multifaceted nature of the role.
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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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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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AI for research – African Doctoral Academy
I gave this presentation on AI in research for participants at the African Doctoral Academy. I highlighted the fact that generative AI as a sophisticated tool that predicts text and generates coherent multimodal content. The presentation discussed AI’s potential in roles like idea generation and data analysis, its current limitations like bias, and emphasised the…
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Compress a PhD+experience into 3-6 months
https://www.quantumleap.education/joinus/founding_learning_engineer.html “Quantum Leap is building the world’s best system for rapidly acquiring expertise. Our first courses will be on large language models and AI safety, for which we’re aiming to compress a PhD and several years’ experience into 3-6 months using accelerated learning methods developed by the US military.” Whether you agree that it’s possible…
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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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Claude, help me draft the outline of my academic paper
My last 2 posts have dealt with 1) the use of Claude to complete a peer review, and 2) how journals could include this process in their workflow. It follows that authors should be using LLMs as well. There are the obvious use cases; rephrasing passages, summarising, expanding, correcting, and so on. However, I think…
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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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KeyLIME podcast
I saw Jonathan Sherbino at the conference yesterday, and was reminded of the excellent KeyLIME podcast. You should definitely check it out.
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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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OpenPhysio podcast: Considering the precariat
Earlier this month I finally managed to publish an episode of the OpenPhysio podcast that’s been on my to-do list for about a year. I’ve been wanting to get the journal podcast series up and running for a while but for various reasons I haven’t been able to work on it as regularly as I’d…
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Research is applied curiosity
I sometimes hear colleagues say that they’re ‘not researchers’ but after some probing it turns out that what they really mean is, they don’t love the process of conducting formal research as is often required by higher education institutions. I try to think of research and scholarship as applied curiosity, which reframes the concept in…
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Thinking in public: A conversation with Tom Jesson
Tom Jesson is a physiotherapist, and self-employed researcher and writer based in Houston Texas, who I’ve wanted to speak to for a while. While I’ve always known Tom to be a thoughtful and careful writer, evident in his work that’s been published and shared widely in physiotherapy circles, I’ve not really thought much about how…