‘‘ K
EENIOUS is a new type of search engine that helps students and researchers discover relevant material.
It uses artificial intelligence to analyse documents and retrieve a list of relevant research articles. It is accessible through its website and users can add Keenious to Microsoft Word and Google Docs for efficient use. The tool uses AI to search the Open Alex data set – a free index of the world’s research. “We are not curators of the data set,” Frode says. “Think of us as the engine that figures out what is relevant from this data set. So, we don’t have the full text itself, but we provide links to interesting articles and if you’re at a university you can check if you have access.”
Until recently the tool was available free online but it has been modified as sales to university libraries picked up: “Our new basic version has some limits on results and document size. This is to make sure it’s fair for universities that pay for our service. We still want to make sure people who can’t afford it, especially in less wealthy areas, can use Keenious too.”
Keenious has 30 university clients, their first customers mostly being based in the nordic countries, but now includes Carnegie Mellon in the US which, Frode says, “is seen by many as the birthplace of AI, so selling an AI tool to them is very exciting” (Keenious is mentioned in this article about the university library’s role in developing
What we are developing is an AI tool that makes it easier to discover information that you want to read, a tool that helps you discover things that you could be really interested in.
Library buyers’ role in tech start-ups
Frode Opdahl, CEO of Keenious explains the origins of an AI-driven start-up and how its success depends on library buyers keeping the sector attractive to start-ups that wish to innovate the research experience.
AI –
www.library.cmu.edu/about/news/2023-08/ai- history) It is also in trials with Trinity College Dublin and in talks with multiple others.
Origin
“I never worked in a library, I’m a com- puter science student and I wasn’t a big user of the library myself,” Frode says. “I was struggling to find relevant articles for my master’s thesis as a student. Ironically, I was working on a recommendation system for articles while I was struggling to find relevant articles. That was when I thought ‘what if I analysed a lot of the research articles and could compare them with my text?’ Then I could put the results in a sidebar next to my document and it sounded super useful and no one else had made it, and that’s basically the origin story. It was later that we saw it as a tool for libraries.”
Asked if Keenious poses a threat to the library profession, Frode points out that direction and the development of Keenious is carried out in collaboration with librarians. He adds: “They are happy because this is another tool in their tool kit to help their users.”
Referring back to his own experience as a student who didn’t use the library, he says: “A big selling point is that Keenious can be added into the workflow of all the students and faculties without them having to install it. That makes it a new avenue for the library to get exposure and a new place where the library wasn’t available before. When students or researchers open it up we make it very obvious that this is something that the library is providing.”
Frode Opdahl. Less is more
Frode says Keenious is academia-friendly AI because it delivers value to its users differently to most other AI models. “ChatGPT and many other AI tools are very focussed on giving you an answer. You ask a question, it gives you an answer. All the value is in the response. We don’t focus on giving you that answer, partly because the answer might be wrong, but mainly because giving you the answer means you didn’t go through any critical thinking of your own. “What we are developing is an AI tool that makes it easier to discover infor- mation that you want to read, a tool that helps you discover things that you could be really interested in, and the end prod- uct is not just a simple one paragraph answer, but a user that knows something.
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