Researchers’ Series Special Topics 2023 - Search Engine and Large Language Models – Can They Truly Change the Game?
Abstract
Academic search engines are racing to incorporate the latest advancements brought about by Large Language models (LLMs) in terms of their ability to understand queries, extract information and directly generate answers. The first movers in this space were startup and challengers such as Elicit.org, Consensus.AI, Scite assistant, Scispace but they have recently been joined by established academic search engine provider like Elsevier’s Scopus and Digital Science’s Dimensions joining the fray with more to come.
Using techniques like RAG (Retrieval augmented generation), this first wave of academic search engines hopes to combine search technology with generative AI by grounding the answers generated by LLMs using information context found by search engines, with the hope of reducing hallucinations. But is this enough?
Join Aaron as he shares his experience testing and using these tools and his best guess on how these tools might develop in the future and their impact on research writing in the future.
Registration: https://lbcube.hkust.edu.hk/ce/event/9721
About the Speaker
Aaron Tay has been an academic librarian for over 10 years in Singapore and has worked in a variety of areas including library discovery, research support & bibliometrics. He is current Lead Data Services at the Singapore Management University Libraries and has been honoured for his contributions to the profession with a few awards including Library Association of Singapore (LAS) Professional Service Award, Congress of Southeast Asian Libraries (CONSAL) award (Silver) and Pacific Rim Research Library Alliance (PRRLA) , Karl Lo award.
A past contributor to NMC horizon report (library edition), as well as a founding member of the Initiative for Open Abstracts, he has blended his interest in discovery and the evolving Scholarly ecosystem and has given talks on how AI/ML might change Scholarly communication. More recently, he has contributed to panels and given keynotes on the impact of AI and in particular large language models on academic libraries and institutions at conferences like CILIP, IATUL and more. He has been blogging at MusingsAboutLibrarianship.blogpost.com since 2009.
Notes
1) The Zoom meeting ID will be sent to registrants at 5pm, 1 day before the session.
2) 1.5 credit hours will be counted toward the course requirement of PDEV 6770A/C/D/E.