AI Tools and Resources for Biomedical Research

Introduction:

Everywhere you look these days you will see the words Artificial Intelligence.  It exists in media, old and new: Hal9000 in 2001, the seductive robots of Ex Machina and Blade Runner, the Foundation TV series, Klara in Klara and the Sun, I, Robot, and myriad more fictional accounts in literature. In almost all of these portrayals, AI is presented as dangerous to us in some way. How can we reconcile that view with all the AI we live with every day: smart cars, smart appliances, Grammarly, Netflix recommendations, and Nest thermostats? For those of us who are not computer scientists or someone whose work is artificial intelligence, how do we understand the ubiquitous, complex, rapidly evolving world of AI?

The authors of this guide are librarians. We are not AI experts, but we spend a lot of time helping people at Stanford with questions about AI and, of course, live our lives outside of work immersed in the current of AI moving through our world. Because of the size, complexity, and rapidity of change, we ask you, the readers, to help keep this content current and accurate. If you read something here that needs fixing or amplifying or find that something needs to be added or removed, let us know.

Goals of this Guide:

• Provide definitions of key concepts in Artificial Intelligence.
• Provide a list of Stanford resource guides for using AI responsibly.
• Showcase a variety of AI tools using applications related to 1) literature searching, 2) medical reference, 3) knowledge syntheses (e.g., systematic/scoping reviews), and article analysis and summarization.