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

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11–20 of 134 posts

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

#11

Independent researcher without academic address; can't get in. Best of luck.

Same. This is me: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=eQ1uJ6UAAAAJ&hl=es

And post.harvard.edu has been sunsetted for alums, so I don't have that email either.

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

#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, measuring direct consumption (self-reported outcomes are acceptable), with at least 25 subjects in treatment and control groups (or at least 10 clusters for cluster-assigned studies), and with outcomes measured at least one day after treatment begins.

I just got the results back: https://www.undermind.ai/query_app/display_one_search/e5d964....

It certainly didn't find everything in my dataset, but:

* the first result is in the dataset.

* The second one is a study I excluded for something buried deep in the text.

* The third is in our dataset.

* The fourth is excluded for something the machine should have caught (32 subjects in total), but perhaps I needed to clarify 25 subjects in treatment and control each.

* The fifth result is a protocol for the study in result 3, so a more sophisticated search would have identified that these were related.

* The sixth study was entirely new to me, and though it didn't qualify because of the way the control group received some aspect of treatment, it's still something that my existing search processes missed, so right away I see real value.

So, overall, I am impressed, and I can easily imagine my lab paying for this. It would have to advance substantially before it was my only search method for a meta-analysis -- it seems to have missed a lot of the gray literature, particularly those studies published on animal advocacy websites -- but that's a much higher bar than I need for it to be part of my research toolkit.

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

#13
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 meta-analysis, you might want to try the "extend" feature. It sends the agent to gather more papers (we only analyze 100 carefully initially), so if your report might say "only 55% discovered", could be useful.

(Also, if you want, you can share your report URL here, others will be able to take a look.)

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

#14
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 meta-analysis, you might want to try the "extend" feature. It sends the agent to gather more papers (we only analyze 100 carefully initially), so if your report might say "only 55% discovered", could be useful. (Also, if you want, you can share your report URL here, others will be able to take a look.)

Thanks, I added my URL

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

#15
post #8

I’ve been using a similar platform that I really like called Answer This[1]. I’ll have to check out yours as well and see how it compares. 1. https://answerthis.io/

I ran these two example searches we have on our homepage on AnswerThis: (3D ion shuttling) https://undermind.ai/query_app/display_one_search/b3767fb7b6... (laser cooling to BEC) https://undermind.ai/query_app/display_one_search/c5f77f862a...

The results from their website aren't sharable, but their lists of references do not seem relevant (ie. they miss the fact that shuttling needs to be in 3D, and the list of experiments for laser cooling to BEC is missing all of the relevant papers).

I think, like other research tools, they're more focused on the summarization/extraction of information, rather than the discovery process (though they are similar to us in the way they say they do multi-stage retrieval and it takes some time).

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

#16
I'm a CS academic who _should_ be working on finalizing a new submission, so when I saw this on HN I decided to give it a try and see if it could find anything in the literature that I'd missed. Somewhat to my surprise, it did - the top 10 results contained two items that I really ought to have found myself (they're from my own community!), but that I'd missed. There were also some irrelevant results mixed in (and lots of things I was already aware of), but overall I'm very impressed with this and will try it out again in the future. Nice work :)

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

#20
post #19

I've been using https://exa.ai for this. It doesn't do any advanced agent stuff like here, but it's way better than Google, especially if you're not quite sure what you're looking for.

Agreed, exa is great - particularly, it's the best thing I've found for fast web retrieval of slightly more complex topics than Perplexity, Google, etc can handle.
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