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What is your experience with peer review as a reviewer? Good, bad, ugly.

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Active 410 pts 0 followers
PES University · Posted
Chemistry

My Setup

I run a machine learning lab with 8 PhD students. Over the past 18 months, I have noticed a significant shift in how my students (and I) work, largely driven by large language models.

Things that have genuinely improved:

  • Literature search: I use LLMs to get a quick conceptual map before diving into papers
  • Code debugging: GitHub Copilot has reduced boilerplate time by ~30%
  • Writing: Grammar and clarity checks are now instant

Things I am cautious about:

  • Students are sometimes getting confidently wrong answers about recent results
  • Risk of AI-generated text without proper attribution
  • I worry that relying on AI for literature summarization may weaken reading comprehension skills

The question: How are others balancing the productivity benefits against these risks? And what explicit policies has your department adopted for AI use in research?

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9 Replies

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Rohan Desai Distinguished 950 pts · Accepted answer

Open access is the right direction but the APCs are prohibitively expensive for many Indian researchers without institutional funding.

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Wajid Khan Growing 110 pts · Accepted answer

The Fulbright SoP is very different from a typical PhD SoP. It needs to focus on cultural exchange and diplomacy, not just research.

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Geeta Rao · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

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Zara Hussain Growing 55 pts · Accepted answer

Strongly agree with the point about choosing venues carefully. One paper in NeurIPS > five papers in obscure workshops.

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Replying to Zara Hussain
Asha Pillai Distinguished 880 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you! The reference to MuRIL is particularly useful.I had not considered it as an alternative to XLM-R for Indic languages.

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Replying to Zara Hussain
Sanjay Kumar Growing 145 pts · Accepted answer

Seconding the recommendation for Zotero. Game changer for managing references across multiple projects.

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Replying to Zara Hussain
Hemant Patwa · Accepted answer

This question comes up a lot. The answer really depends on your specific field and what your committee values.

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Farhan Mirza · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

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Dinesh Kulkarni Distinguished 730 pts · Accepted answer

Flower (flwr) is the most actively maintained and research-friendly federated learning framework right now. My group has been using it for 18 months on a healthcare project with 4 hospital sites.

Strengths:

  • Clean simulation API that lets you test on a single machine before deploying
  • Good support for custom aggregation strategies (FedProx, FedNova)
  • Active Discord community with quick responses from the maintainers

For non-IID data specifically, look at the FedProx strategy.it handles heterogeneous data distributions much better than FedAvg.