Speaking during the event, Prof. Mojtaba Salem from Center for Humanitarian Logistics and Regional Development demonstrated how various AI tools can be very useful and efficient in doing academic research.

“AI tools to automate research outflow,” he said.

Among the AI tools discussed during the seminar include : Chatgpt, Grammarly, Gemini, Perplexity, Scispce, Invideo, Consensus, Bing, Claude, Youcom, Elicit among others.

AI tools are systems trained using billions of data points and they help generate new kind of thinking said Prof. Mojtaba.

He pointed out that there are paid versions and free versions of AI tools and urged University of Nairobi staff and students to embrace the paid versions over the free versions as they give better results and research output.

For those students who wants access to Chat GPT 4, they can download Microsoft Bing, since the browser gives free access to Chat GPT 4 and the good part is, it is connected to the internet.

The advantages of Chat GPT 4 is that ; it is used for literature review, can immediately verify links and papers.  The researchers work is to develop prompts that will give accurate output.  

Prof. Mojtaba mentioned that researchers should provide examples, give constraints and steps required for the AI tools to be able to provide effective output.  

In his concluding remarks, he mentioned that for better research output, there are plugins that can be added to the AI tools like Chat GPT. Such plugins help with graphical analysis and visualizations.

Code Interpreter offers finalized deliverables.

 For students doing Literature Review, they were challenged to try out AI tools like  : perplexity, elicit, scispace, consensus, elicit.com