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Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers

#91

Post by shashkingregory »

jramette wrote: post #47
shashkingregory wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used undermind for literature search and it was very precise! Thanks for the product! I wonder how you plan to extend the search to full paper content (will Semantic Scholar api allow this) - and do you plan to connect more datasets (which ones)? (many of them are paid...)

We'll certainly be able to include open access full texts, which is already a substantial fraction of the published papers, and a growing fraction too, as the publishing industry is rapidly moving toward open access. Paywalled full text search would require working with the publishers, which is more involved.

Great! I can definitely ask undermind for an overview paper of the scientific information landscape, unless you have a favourite in quick access to share?

Re: Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers

#92

Post by admissionsguy »

This works well. Well done. There was a similar product on HN a few weeks ago and it mostly failed on my favourite topics. Undermind returned all the papers I would expect. The ordering of the results could be improved since in the case I tested, it does not reflect well the relative importance of the papers. I think it may give too much weight to direct similarity to the search query, which could sometimes be an advantage.

Re: Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers

#94

Post by lyjackal »

tom_hartke wrote: post #25
rjchint wrote: post #23

How would you compare your product to elicit.ai? In my opinion elicit has better looking UI and much more features and further along

I think the biggest difference is our focus on search quality, and being willing to spend a lot on compute to do it, while they focus on systematic extraction of data from existing sources and on being fast. It's a bit of an oversimplification (they of course have search, and we also have extraction). Feature-wise, we definitely have a lot of work to do :) What crucial pieces do you think we're missing?

From what I understand, that’s not the case. They are working on both. I’d be concerned about how you can differentiate and compete with them. They have a big head start

Re: Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers

#95

Post by xbmcuser »

Something like this was the first thing that came to my mind when chat gpt and their ilk started showing up. The amount of knowledge in so many fields is so vast that it is impossible for any one or even a group people to access and utilise properly. Serendipity is still needed for many things LLM will make it occur more regularly

Re: Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers

#96

Post by fullstackchris »

passwordoops wrote: post #93

"manually dig through papers on Google Scholar for hours." Is exactly how you gain expertise in a field and/or find those subtle gaps in knowledge that are the seeds of real breakthrough

but the actual manually digging is not - reading the paper is, and the faster you can get some 10-20 papers, the better off you are

Re: Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers

#97

Post by setgree »

physicsguy wrote: post #82
setgree wrote: post #12

Very cool, and very relevant to my life -- I am currently writing a meta-analysis and finishing my literature search. I gave it a version of my question, it asked me reasonable follow-ups, and we refined the search to: > I want to find randomized controlled trials published by December 2023, investigating interventions to reduce consumption of meat and animal products with control groups receiving no treatment, measu…

For a systematic review/meta analysis you’d be expected to document your search strategy, exclusion criteria, etc anyway wouldn’t you? That’d preclude using a tool like this other than as a sense check to see if you needed to add more keywords/expand your search criteria anyway. My wife does that for her day job (in the U.K. national healthcare system) and the systematic reviews have to be super well documented and e…

I was planning to say "I used an AI search tool" and cite undermind.ai in my methods section. I think that won't raise any eyebrows in the review process but we'll see.

Re: Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers

#100

Post by setgree »

Mkengine wrote: post #88
setgree wrote: post #12

Very cool, and very relevant to my life -- I am currently writing a meta-analysis and finishing my literature search. I gave it a version of my question, it asked me reasonable follow-ups, and we refined the search to: > I want to find randomized controlled trials published by December 2023, investigating interventions to reduce consumption of meat and animal products with control groups receiving no treatment, measu…

I only have some experience writing normal papers, so just out of interest, could you elaborate what your usual search routine for a meta-analysis is?

There's a whole established process for this, see here for a textbook chapter https://training.cochrane.org/handbook/current/chapter-04

However, because I'm writing a methods-focused review -- we only look at RCTs meeting certain (pretty minimal) criteria relating to statistical power and measurement validity -- what I'm doing is closer to a combination of review of previous reviews (there have been dozens in my field) and a snowball search (searching bibliographies of papers that are relevant). I also consulted with experts in the field. however, finding bachelor's theses has been challenging, but many are actually relevant, so undermind was helpful there.

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