Jul 29, 2024
LLM Research Collaboration Recommender
David McSharry
A tool that searches for other researchers with similar research interests/complementary skills to your own to make finding a high-quality research collaborator more likely.
I like the idea of the project, and I like how references are provided for how the skills and research interests can be complementary. I would like to see more features being introduced that aim to reduce the number of steps the user has to take from getting a recommendation to starting a collaboration.
This is a cool project, I like that it could be beneficial for all researchers, rather than only more junior ones. I like the interface is clean and intuitive and builds off the existing tag system on LW. Have you considered trying to add this as a feature to LW? There could be some nice integrations, for example users could mark themselves as open or closed to new collaborators, which would help improve the likelihood of recommendations leading to collaborations.
Love this and could see a version of this being extremely useful for AIS researchers. Would be great to reach out to LW or AF and talk about whether they’d be up for testing a prototype on their page?
Love this! It’s a tool that I think could be implemented in the entire research pipeline, where it prompted when a researcher asks for a critique of an agenda or grant proposal (the LLM basically pro-actively suggests some people the author should consider reaching out to in order to collaborate on the project or ask for feedback; you could even have a pre-written message to reduce friction to send potential collaborators a message).I think what would make this project work exceptionally well is to integrate it into already-existing things that researchers in the alignment ecosystem do so that they don’t even have to remember to seek out collaborators.In addition, I think it would be beneficial to add people who are outside of LW (authors of relevant papers, for example) in order to broaden the search and improve cross-pollination and strength-matching. It could grab their email and have a pre-written email for the authors to lower friction.People who actively want to show they are looking for collaborators could have a specific account bio that they are prompted to update periodically to say what they are currently interested in. You can use an LLM to create a pre-written bio based on their work to help them get started and then they can edit how they like.Overall, thank you for getting started on building this!PS: You could use the Alignment Research Dataset to get around the rate limit.
Cite this work
@misc {
title={
LLM Research Collaboration Recommender
},
author={
David McSharry
},
date={
7/29/24
},
organization={Apart Research},
note={Research submission to the research sprint hosted by Apart.},
howpublished={https://apartresearch.com}
}
