Agentic AI Notebook
Phase 28

AI Research Assistant

~3 min read

Concept & How It Works

  • Key points are in the visual diagram above.

Why Does It Exist?

Researchers need synthesis across dozens of sources. This capstone demonstrates grounded generation, citation enforcement, and academic tool integration.

Real-World Analogy

A PhD student who highlights every claim with a page number — if they can't find the source, they say 'I don't know.'
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Visual Workflows

What is AI Research Assistant?

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Example

Scenario

Question: 'Compare RAG eval metrics 2024–2025.' Agent retrieves 14 chunks from 9 papers, outputs table (RAGAS faithfulness, DeepEval, human eval cost) each row linked to DOI, exports references.bib.

Solution

In Capstone Projects, apply AI Research Assistant to this scenario: Question: 'Compare RAG eval metrics 2024–2025. Identify the inputs, run the technique, validate the output, and note one thing you would monitor in production.

Practice Task

Do this before moving to the next module — reading alone is not enough.

Open the Code Walkthrough below and run it locally. Change one parameter related to AI Research Assistant (e.g. model, temperature, top_k, or tool name), observe the difference in output, and write 2–3 sentences explaining what changed.

Code Walkthrough

Highlighted lines show where AI Research Assistant happens in the code.

AI Research Assistant
1# AI Research Assistant — minimal example2from openai import OpenAI3
4client = OpenAI()  # create API client5
6# Ask the model to explain this topic7response = client.chat.completions.create(  # core API call for AI Research Assistant8    model="gpt-4o-mini",9    messages=[10        {"role": "system", "content": "You explain ai research assistant clearly."},11        {"role": "user", "content": f"What is ai research assistant?"},12    ],13    temperature=0,14)15print(response.choices[0].message.content)  # show output for debugging

Commands to Remember

Commands to Remember

  • git checkout -b capstone/project-name # isolate capstone work
  • docker-compose up -d # run full stack locally

Common Mistakes

  • Letting LLM cite from training memory
  • Fixed-size chunks on academic PDFs
  • No reranker on retrieval

Cheat Sheet

Quick recap — the most important points from this module.

Cheat Sheet

quick ref
  • No cite = no claim
  • Chunk by section
  • arXiv + vector hybrid