Janet: a prototype of a conversational agent for a virtual research environment Ibrahim A. S. T., Candela L. Conversational agents have been undergoing a lot of development where they have reached their best nowadays thanks to the large language models that have been developed over the past years. Thanks to this, the capabilities of such agents have become more diverse and they are now able to perform a wide range of tasks which can be harnessed to reduce or even replace the human effort in performing those tasks. Therefore, in an effort to equip scientific communities with such a powerful tool, we developed a prototype conversational agent, Janet, and deployed it into one virtual research environment (VRE) with the aim of supporting the scientists in exploiting the knowledge contained within these environments. Janet is still in the preliminary phase where there is a need for extensive testing and improvement; however, this report shows the main aspects of Janet including the architecture, implementation and deployment.Source: ISTI Technical Report, ISTI-2023-TR/006, 2023 DOI: 10.32079/isti-tr-2023/006 Project(s): Blue Cloud Metrics:
Conversational agents for virtual research environments: a survey of the literature Ibrahim A. S. T., Candela L. Conversational artificial intelligence is becoming a rather hot topic in the field of artificial intelligence especially after the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI. That is why it is useful to conduct a survey of the literature regarding conversational agents in order to have an idea about the techniques used to develop such systems. Therefore, the aim of this report is to aggregate and summarize the previous research efforts in order to provide insight that would aid future researchers. In addition, the survey was conducted within the context of developing Janet, a conversational agent for virtual research environments; thus, it can be used as a starting point for similar projects.Source: ISTI Technical Report, ISTI-2023-TR/007, 2023 DOI: 10.32079/isti-tr-2023/007 Project(s): Blue Cloud Metrics:
InfraScience research activity report 2023 Artini M., Assante M., Atzori C., Baglioni M., Bardi A., Bosio C., Bove P., Calanducci A., Candela L., Casini G., Castelli D., Cirillo R., Coro G., De Bonis M., Debole F., Dell'Amico A., Frosini L., Ibrahim A. S. T., La Bruzzo S., Lelii L., Manghi P., Mangiacrapa F., Mangione D., Mannocci A., Molinaro E., Pagano P., Panichi G., Paratore M. T., Pavone G., Piccioli T., Sinibaldi F., Straccia U., Vannini G. L. InfraScience is a research group of the National Research Council of Italy - Institute of Information Science and Technologies (CNR - ISTI) based in Pisa, Italy. This report documents the research activity performed by this group in 2023 to highlight the major results. In particular, the InfraScience group engaged in research challenges characterising Data Infrastructures, e-Science, and Intelligent Systems. The group activity is pursued by closely connecting research and development and by promoting and supporting open science. In fact, the group is leading the development of two large scale infrastructures for Open Science, i.e. D4Science and OpenAIRE. During 2023 InfraScience members contributed
to the publishing of several papers, to the research and development activities of several research projects (primarily funded by EU), to the organization of conferences and training events, to several working groups and task forces.Source: ISTI Annual Reports, 2023 DOI: 10.32079/isti-ar-2023/002 Project(s): Blue Cloud , EOSC Future , TAILOR Metrics: