The University Faculty Senate (UFS) Graduate Education and Research Committee, composed of 10 faculty members from 7 SUNY campuses successfully proposed a resolution in Spring 2024 on "197-01-1: AI Tools for Research". We are proposing to build and evaluate an AI Research Assistant (AI-RA) to help researchers and students leverage AI resources in a responsible, ethical, and beneficial manner with the goal of enhancing research skills and productivity. An important piece of this will be a resource guide that critically appraises currently available AI tools to support research, creative activities, and scholarship. AI-RA will be made available individually to each faculty member, and to students involved in research, with an emphasis on ethical and responsible use of AI in research. Typical uses of AI-RA may involve for each user: 1) recommendations in the choice, and possible combination, of AI tools for research, 2) educating students on the ethical and responsible use of AI tools for research, 3) generating and brainstorming novel research ideas, 4) searching the literature and summarizing results, 5) locating potential funding opportunities for their work, and 6) locating resources for their work from across the SUNY System and beyond (such as mentoring, high performance computing, special equipment, data banks, etc.). A particular emphasis of the system will be to provide personalized and up-to-date recommendations in a rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Project currently ongoing