INQUEST is a comprehensive virtual research assistant designed to streamline and organize research efforts, focusing on aiding women in academia and research. Derived from the need to overcome the underrepresentation and challenges faced by women in research fields, INQUEST provides a platform for efficient, collaborative, and enhanced research work.
Women in academia face unique challenges that hinder their research progress:
- Underrepresentation: Difficulty finding collaborators and accessing relevant research in male-dominated fields.
- Time Constraints: Balancing between work, family, and unpaid care work, leaving less time for research activities.
- Citation Gap: Research papers authored by women receive fewer citations, affecting their academic recognition and career progression.
- Gender Bias: Additional pressure to produce error-free research due to prevalent biases, impacting confidence and productivity.
INQUEST aims to mitigate these challenges by providing a tailored research assistant platform.
- Collaborative Workspaces: Users can create and join workspaces with unique codes, promoting collaboration among researchers.
- Third-party Library Integration: Access to a wide range of libraries and APIs to support various research needs.
- In-browser PDF Viewer and Annotator: Tools for reading and annotating research papers directly within the platform.
- PDF Summarization: Customized model to summarize lengthy documents, saving time and highlighting key points.
- Collaborative Workspaces: Implementing a user-friendly and secure environment for collaborative research was complex.
- Integration Issues: Encountering and resolving compatibility issues with third-party libraries and APIs.
- Feature Implementation: Ensuring the in-browser tools like PDF viewer and annotator were efficient and user-friendly.
- Custom Model Development: Building a reliable model for summarizing PDFs required extensive testing and refinement.