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

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81–90 of 134 posts

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

#81

My first impression is that it’s quite cool, but it should weight things by importance to some degree. I tried a search on my previous research area ( https://www.undermind.ai/query_app/display_one_search/5408b4... ) and it missed some key theoretical papers. At the same time, it picked up the three or four papers I’d expected it to find plus a PhD thesis I expected it to find. The results at the top of the list thou…

Appreciate the comments. One thing to note: how much compute it takes to "get everything" varies from search to search, and researchers don't always care about that and usually care most about getting a few specifically relevant results, so we start each search with a first pass with a fixed amount of compute. I know there's a lot to absorb on each search page, but if look near the bottom of the summary, Undermind is predicting is has only found about 80% of the papers with the compute dedicated to this search so far. Logged in users on Pro accounts can "extend" the search until it's gotten 90% or more to ensure exhaustiveness. One other thing I'd be curious about is your notion of "importance" here, can you help us define that here? Any ideas for how would say a very smart human assistant who's not intimately familiar with your community's interests be able to pick out paper 7 from the list according to what you mean by importance? Maybe we need a way to communicate to the system that you're interested in pedagogical or seminal works in the field?

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

#82
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 even pre-registered on a system called PROSPERO. The published papers always have the full search strategy at the end.

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

#85

My first impression is that it’s quite cool, but it should weight things by importance to some degree. I tried a search on my previous research area ( https://www.undermind.ai/query_app/display_one_search/5408b4... ) and it missed some key theoretical papers. At the same time, it picked up the three or four papers I’d expected it to find plus a PhD thesis I expected it to find. The results at the top of the list thou…

Appreciate the comments. One thing to note: how much compute it takes to "get everything" varies from search to search, and researchers don't always care about that and usually care most about getting a few specifically relevant results, so we start each search with a first pass with a fixed amount of compute. I know there's a lot to absorb on each search page, but if look near the bottom of the summary, Undermind is…

Not OP and I don't know if that would be feasible for you, but a Pro feature could be something like https://asreview.nl to determine importance/relevance?

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

#87

My first impression is that it’s quite cool, but it should weight things by importance to some degree. I tried a search on my previous research area ( https://www.undermind.ai/query_app/display_one_search/5408b4... ) and it missed some key theoretical papers. At the same time, it picked up the three or four papers I’d expected it to find plus a PhD thesis I expected it to find. The results at the top of the list thou…

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

#88
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?

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

#90
Tried it. It would save me a lot of time, I would say!

One suggestion: The back-and-forth chat in the beginning could be improved with a more extensive interaction. So, the final prompt could be more fine-grained into a specific area/context/anything one would aim for.

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