#17: 🤖 Revolutionizing Research with AI: ChatGPT and Beyond
Improving research efficiency and productivity through text completion, summarization, and literature search
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Wednesday and welcome back to my #17th Nina’s Note. After a couple weeks off to enjoy the holidays, I’m ready to get back to summarizing the hottest topics in science for you each week.
Let’s go!
💬 In this note:
🤖 Revolutionizing Research with AI: ChatGPT and Beyond
🩼 A Potential Cure for Type I Diabetes
🕯 Station Eleven
🤖 Revolutionizing Research with AI: ChatGPT and Beyond
For the last two decades Google Search transformed how we search for and access information. Learning how to search using keywords enabled researchers, scientists and nonscientists to find information, access articles and get answers quickly.
In the last month, everything changed when ChatGPT was released and the public could finally understand the power of artificial intelligence (AI). Now anyone can submit a prompt to ChatGPT and the AI will understand the intent behind the query and generate human-like text to answer the question.
This powerful tool is changing the way we think, research and gather consensus about a topic. It can perform tasks such as text completion and summarization. It can generate new ideas, write papers and grant proposals, and search through large amounts of scientific literature.
Additionally, ChatGPT can be integrated with other software to assist in various research-related tasks. Following reports of a $10 billion investment in OpenAI the parent company of ChatGPT, it is rumored that Microsoft is looking to integrate ChatGPT into all MS Office products.
While ChatGPT is dominating in this new field of AI-research tools, there are also several other scholarly softwares that I wish existed while I was still in graduate school.
One is called Consensus, a search engine making information in research studies accessible to the public. Consensus is built on top of Semantic Scholar, created by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2). Semantic Scholar is AI2’s research tool that pulls from a library of more than 200 million publications.
Semantic Scholar’s library has been “semantically” analyzed to draw meaning from paper texts and rank them for the most relevant content for a given search. Over the past two years, Semantic Scholar has also built out its services to integrate with bolt-on applications.
Semantic Scholar now supports close to 600 researchers and applications. These applications are a growing number of services geared toward researchers that go beyond traditional search like Google Scholar and PubMed, the National Institutes of Health’s tool.
What are other helpful tools for academics?
1️⃣ Connected Papers a visual tool to map and recommend papers
2️⃣ Collaboratory - Collaboratory is a one-of-a-kind software that helps higher education understand the landscape of their engagement – the who, what, where, when and why of activities designed with and for their community.
3️⃣ Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations
4️⃣ Opscidia uses AI to find high impact scientific publications in your field
🩼 A Potential Cure for Type I Diabetes
Cell therapy is a way to cure diabetes by transplanting cells that make insulin into the body. The downside of this treatment is that it requires the patient's immune system to be turned off so the body doesn't reject the newly transplanted cells.
For the cells to be accepted by the body, the immune system needs to be turned off permanently. Lifelong immunosuppression can cause serious problems because it makes the patient more likely to get sick and they can no longer receive life-saving vaccinations
Scientists at Georgia Tech have found a way to use a special material to make the body accept the transplanted cells without turning off the immune system. The researchers have spun the technology out of the university into the start-up, iTolerance, which is working to enable transplantable tissue, organoid or cell therapy without the requirement for lifelong immunosuppression.
This material is called ITOL-100 and is made of a substance called hydrogel which is mostly water and a little bit of synthetic polymer.
Remember the new biomaterials from Nina’s Notes #9: 3D Printed Organs? iTOL-100 is similar to the materials described in that Note. iTOL-100 acts as a fishnet, catching a potent immune system protein, Fas Ligand (FsL), to decorate the material and train the immune system to accept the transplanted cells as if they were its own.
Currently iTOL-100 only works with individual cells, making it ideal for diabetes research and even liver failure because both conditions can be treated on a cell-by-cell basis.
iTolerance’s breakthrough could revolutionize the treatment and health of Type I diabetes patients. “Insulin is a way to manage diabetes, but it’s not a cure. Cell therapy is the cure.” says Andrés Garcia, member of iTolerance’s scientific advisory board.
📚 Book of the Week
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Station Eleven follows five people distantly connected from the fateful night a pandemic breaks out and causes the collapse of civilization. Is it too soon for an apocalyptic pandemic drama? HBO didn't think so, and turned it into a limited series.
⚡️ Check This Out
Beige and neutral tones are the latest trend for children’s clothes and toys.
American comedian and writer Hayley DeRoche created the TikTok account, That Sad Beige Lady (@sadbeige), and corresponding instagram account @officialsadbeige to warm our hearts through this colorless trend.
Through her impersonation of Werner Herzog, she reviews various product catalogs such as “säd bëige clothes for säd bëige childrün.” BBC Radio 4 - You and Yours describes her as “very funny” in a recent interview.
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