Tag: research
-
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.
-
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.
-
Link: The Latest “Crisis” — Is the Research Literature Overrun with ChatGPT- and LLM-generated Articles?
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2024/03/20/the-latest-crisis-is-the-research-literature-overrun-with-chatgpt-and-llm-generated-articles/ “Elsevier has been under the spotlight this month for publishing a paper that contains a clearly ChatGPT-written portion of its introduction. The first sentence of the paper’s Introduction reads, “Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic:…” To date, the article remains unchanged, and unretracted.“
-
Resource: Using generative AI during a PhD
“This session will look at how a set of generative AI tools can be used to support various aspects of research, such as ChatGPT, Ellicit and DALL-E (although the final selection of tools will be made nearer to the workshop). Opportunities will be provided to try out the tools alongside discussion with other participants. The…
-
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…
-
The Good and Bad Of Academia
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-good-and-bad-of-academia “There are of course also many things I don’t like about academia. Such as using language styles more to impress than to communicate, treating prestige as if it counted for strong evidence, insisting on either strong methods or silence, and ignoring most everything done by non-academics.“ It’s the last part of this except that…
-
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…
-
Scopus AI: Elsevier introduces generative AI search for research papers
https://the-decoder.com/scopus-ai-elsevier-introduces-generative-ai-search-for-research-papers/ Academic publisher Elsevier launched Scopus AI, an AI platform that enables researchers and institutions to use generative AI to quickly and accurately obtain summaries and insights into relevant research from other authors.
-
Our World in Data is an incredible website
https://ourworldindata.org/ “Poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality: The world faces many great and terrifying problems. It is these large problems that our work at Our World in Data focuses on…. The goal of our work is to make the knowledge on the big problems accessible and understandable.” Here’s the page on…
-
Link: The Strain on Scientific Publishing
https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15884 Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published. Total articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science have grown exponentially in recent years; in 2022 the article total was 47% higher than in 2016, which has outpaced the limited growth, if any, in the number of practising scientists. Thus, publication workload…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Link: Using Claude for qualitative data analysis
Claude: how can you help me analyse open response questions on surveys? (2023, October 17). I haven’t played around with this a lot, but I have run some of my anonymised PhD transcripts through Claude a few months ago, and was reasonably impressed with the thematic analysis it did. I think it’s worth doing your…
-
Podcast: Tom Davidson on How Quickly AI Could Automate the Economy
https://futureoflife.org/podcast/tom-davidson-on-how-quickly-ai-could-automate-the-economy/ Great conversation with Tom Davidson, with a lot of overlap with Holden Karnofsky’s Most Important Century series. Timestamps 00:00 The current pace of AI03:58 Near-term risks from AI09:34 Historical analogies to AI13:58 AI benchmarks VS economic impact18:30 AI takeoff speed and bottlenecks31:09 Tom’s model of AI takeoff speed36:21 How AI could automate AI research41:49…
-
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…
-
KeyLIME podcast
I saw Jonathan Sherbino at the conference yesterday, and was reminded of the excellent KeyLIME podcast. You should definitely check it out.