AI Discovery Zone @ EdUHK Library's Research Support

Grok 4.1, the latest iteration from xAI, introduces significant enhancements in AI capabilities, particularly in creative, emotional, and collaborative interactions. This model offers improved understanding of nuanced intent, a more engaging conversational style, and a coherent personality, all while maintaining the intelligence and reliability of its predecessors. These advancements make Grok 4.1 a valuable tool for academic research, facilitating more effective collaboration and deeper insights.

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to evolve, offering researchers powerful tools to augment their work. Grok 4.1, developed by xAI, represents a significant leap in AI capabilities, particularly in areas requiring emotional intelligence and creative collaboration. This blog post explores Grok 4.1's features, its relevance to academic research, and provides guidance on its effective use.

What Is This Tool/Concept? 

Grok 4.1 is a Large Language Model (LLM) developed by xAI, designed to engage in human-like conversations with enhanced emotional intelligence and creativity. Building upon the foundation of previous models, Grok 4.1 incorporates advanced reinforcement learning techniques to optimize its style, personality, helpfulness, and alignment. This model is accessible through various platforms, including grok.com, X, and mobile applications. (x.ai)

Why It Matters for Research

Grok 4.1's advanced capabilities offer several benefits for academic research:

• Enhanced Collaboration: Its improved emotional intelligence facilitates more effective communication and collaboration among research teams.

• Creative Assistance: The model's creative prowess can aid in brainstorming sessions, generating innovative ideas, and drafting research proposals.

• Data Interpretation: Grok 4.1 can assist in analyzing complex datasets, providing insights that might be overlooked by traditional methods.

• Literature Review: The model can efficiently summarize and synthesize large volumes of academic literature, aiding in comprehensive reviews.

How to Use It (Step-by-Step Guide)

1. Access Grok 4.1:

   • Visit grok.com or open the X app.
   • Log in to your account or create a new one.

2. Select Grok 4.1 Model:

   • In the model picker, choose "Grok 4.1" to activate the latest version.

3. Initiate Interaction:

   • Type your query or prompt in the chat interface.
   • For example: “Assist me in drafting a research proposal on renewable energy solutions.”

Strengths & Limitations

Strengths:

• Advanced Emotional Intelligence: Grok 4.1 demonstrates a high level of empathy and understanding in interactions.

• Creative Capabilities: The model excels in generating creative content, making it valuable for brainstorming and idea generation.

• Coherent Personality: Consistent and engaging conversational style enhances user experience.

Limitations:

• Contextual Understanding: While improved, the model may still misinterpret complex or ambiguous prompts.

• Dependence on Input Quality: The accuracy of outputs is influenced by the clarity and specificity of user inputs.

• Potential Biases: As with all AI models, Grok 4.1 may inadvertently reflect biases present in its training data.

Best Practices for Responsible AI Use

• Critical Evaluation: Always assess the model's outputs for accuracy and relevance to your research.

• Ethical Considerations: Ensure that the use of AI aligns with ethical standards and does not perpetuate harmful biases.

• Transparency: Clearly disclose the use of AI-generated content in your research publications.

• Data Privacy: Avoid sharing sensitive or confidential information with the AI model.

Comparison With Other Tools 

Compared to other AI models, Grok 4.1 distinguishes itself through its enhanced emotional intelligence and creative capabilities. While models like GPT-4 offer advanced language processing, Grok 4.1's focus on nuanced understanding and collaboration makes it particularly suited for academic research environments.

Conclusion

Grok 4.1 represents a significant advancement in AI, offering researchers a powerful tool for enhancing collaboration, creativity, and data analysis. By understanding its capabilities and limitations, and by adhering to best practices, researchers can effectively integrate Grok 4.1 into their workflows to achieve more insightful and impactful outcomes.

Further Reading / Resources

• Grok 4.1 Announcement

• xAI Documentation on Grok Models

• EQ-Bench3: Emotional Intelligence Benchmark

We’re excited to share news about Qwen3-Max, the latest AI model from the Qwen3 series, designed to support your academic and creative endeavors. With over 1 trillion parameters and training on 36 trillion tokens, Qwen3-Max is a remarkable tool for tackling coursework, coding projects, and complex problem-solving.

What is Qwen3-Max?

• Qwen3-Max-Instruct, the flagship model, ranks third globally on the LMArena leaderboard, surpassing many leading AI models. It excels in:
• Coding: With a score of 69.6 on Verified SWE-Bench, it's an excellent tool for computer science students that are solving programming problems.
• Agent Capabilities: With a 74.8 score on Tau2-Bench, it can facilitate operations like automation and integration of tools, better suited for project development.
• Reasoning: The new-generation Qwen3-Max-Thinking model has achieved top 100% on challenging math benchmarks like AIME 25 and HMMT, promising to be a helpful tool for mathematics-heavy disciplines.

Why It Matters for You

Qwen3-Max can help your studies in a host of ways, from code completion to explaining obtuse concepts and creating research or project ideas. From debugging code, solving equations, to researching new material, this AI model is the solid support you need to do it correctly.

A Peek Behind the Tech

Qwen3-Max has a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture and ChunkFlow, enabling it to process vast amounts of information like contexts of 1 million tokens efficiently. It is ideal for processing long texts or data sets, the best buddy of a research-intensive project.

How to Discover Qwen3-Max

• Try Qwen Chat: Use Qwen3-Max-Instruct directly in Qwen Chat to ask a question or ask for your task.
• Use the API: Available via Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, the API allows you to integrate Qwen3-Max into your applications. Sign up for an Alibaba Cloud account and begin building.
• Stay Tuned: Qwen3-Max-Thinking, committed to high-level thinking, is in development but will soon be available for public use.

Many library databases and subscription services now integrate AI-powered tools to improve user experience, content discovery, and accessibility. Below is a list of subscribed library resources that feature AI-driven research assistant capabilities:

Factiva Smart Summary provides innovative ways to utilize Factiva content by prompting, summarizing, and highlighting the most relevant articles. Users can also create customized newsletters. A free-text prompt gives replies based on selected articles from a large number of sources, drawing from a multi-year archive As an AI summarization tool, its primary advantage lies in saving users time by reducing the need to read all articles from Factiva's curated content.  Learn more

Master AI for Research This Summer & Get Your AI for Research Certificate 

This bootcamp is organised by Scite.  Throughout the bootcamp, you'll receive emails from scite including:

• Session reminders with Zoom links
• Pre-session preparation materials
• Practical exercises and resources
• Tips for maximizing your AI research skills
• Certificate completion updates

Get Your AI for Research Certificate

Remember: Attend any 3 out of 4 sessions (with one industry session mandatory) to earn your AI for Research Certificate.

Registration

CNKI has recently launched AI Academic Research Assistant, an advanced tool that leverages artificial intelligence technology to assist in scientific research. This new version is based on CNKI's vast academic resources and the intelligent technology of the HuaZhi large model, closely integrating AI large model technology, high-quality data, and research scenarios, aiming to enhance efficiency in key areas such as literature retrieval, reading, and academic writing. 

CNKI has provided a trial for the EdUHK current students and staff on the “CNKI AI” services till Oct 31 2025. The services have integrated with DeepSeek R1. Services included: 

• Chatbot grounded on CNKI contents

 • Research assistant based on single article / a collection of articles (up to 10) 

• Writing assistant 

You can test the services by visiting this URL within campus IPs: https://aismart.oversea.cnki.net/ 

You will also need to create a personal account to use the services. 

Though there is no limit on the number of accounts that can be created, each account has its own quota for various services:

Highlight Summary

EBSCO now provides a Natural Language Search mode that uses LLMS to allow you to search using everyday language. It understands what you’re looking for, even if you ask in full sentences, and it delivers better results.

How Does Natural Language Search Work?

Natural Language Search (NLS) lets you search the way you naturally speak or write—no need for special keywords or complicated search rules. No need to use the complex keywords or Boolean operators, for example, you can ask the question "What is the best education for children?" instead of using (education OR schooling) AND (child* OR kid* OR student* OR pupil*) AND (best OR optimal OR effective) AND ("academic achievement" OR outcomes OR “learning results”).

Here is the comparison table of Traditional Search vs. Natural Language Search:

How to Use Natural Language Search Mode?

STEP 1: Go to “Advanced Search Mode” from the basic search.

STEP 2: Under “Search options”, you can select “Natural language” to turn on this mode.

STEP 3:  To turn on NLS mode immediately, simply toggle the Natural Language switch in basic search.

Step 4:  Now let's test NLS mode with our sample question: “What is the best education for children?” Observe how NLS generates 810,595 comprehensive results while the traditional search generates a limited 250 records.

You'll notice that the NLS mode retrieves relevant results containing conceptually related terms, such as “teaching”, “effective”, and “students”—even though these exact words weren't included in our original search query. This demonstrates a key advantage of Natural Language Search: unlike traditional keyword-based systems, NLS leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to interpret the semantic meaning behind your question, eliminating the need for exact keyword matching.

Recommendations from the Library:

To get the most out of EBSCO's search tools, the following strategies for combining NLS and traditional search mode are:

•  Begin with NLS to explore topics broadly using conversational queries
• Switch to traditional search to refine results using precise keywords, Boolean operators, or field tags

The Library has already subscribed to Scite, a powerful AI research tool designed to elevate your research experience. 

Our subject guide, “AI Tools for Your Research: Scite” explains its features and provides instructions for getting started. Recently Scite has launched a new feature, Tables in Scite Assistant, a major advancement that enables researchers to extract, organize and analyze data from scientific literature. 

How to Use AI Tables?
Scite's AI Tables do more than just summarize papers—they help you extract specific data points, methodologies, and outcomes directly from scientific articles.

Step 1: Go to Scite Assistant and select “Use Table Mode” for the new Table function.

Step 2: Click “Add Column” and type “name” and “instructions” for the new column. You can choose the length of the answers, from short to long.

Step 3: Continue creating new columns, such as “Methodology,” “Key Findings,” and others, to organize and analyze your data effectively.

In addition, you can export all references with all columns in various formats, such as CSV, ris and BibTeX.

New Improvements to Scite Assistant

OpenAI o3 mini + Reasoning

A new AI model, OpenAI o3 mini, now integrates advanced reasoning capabilities and is being utilized by Scite. Scite enhances its platform by combining its own datasets and access to scholarly content with powerful AI models, offering researchers tools for analysis and discovery.

What is “Reasoning”?

Reasoning Models: These are advanced AI systems that go beyond simple pattern recognition (which is what most standard AI models do). Instead, they are designed to:

1. Think through problems internally before answering.
2. Consider multiple approaches to solving a question.
3. Evaluate the accuracy of different possible answers. 
4. Plan structured and coherent responses.
5. Solve multi-step problems methodically.