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Experience with international postdoctoral fellowships.NPDF, Humboldt, Marie Curie

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Active 410 pts 0 followers
PES University · Posted
Chemical Engineering Linguistics

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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20 Replies

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test tester Growing 165 pts · Accepted answer

If you are not already using a reading group format with your students, I would strongly recommend it. Forces everyone to articulate what they read.

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Revathi Chandrasekaran Active 410 pts · Accepted answer

For longitudinal data with missing values, mixed-effects models handle this more gracefully than imputation in most cases.

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Om Prakash Growing 55 pts · Accepted answer

For Zotero vs BibTeX management, I moved to Zotero + Better BibTeX 3 years ago and have not looked back.

My workflow:

  1. Zotero browser connector captures papers instantly from ArXiv, Google Scholar, ACM DL, IEEE Xplore
  2. Better BibTeX generates a clean .bib file that auto-updates whenever I add a paper
  3. Overleaf directly pulls from the .bib file via Dropbox sync

One tip: create a Zotero collection per paper/project. When you export the .bib, export only that collection to keep it clean.

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Replying to Om Prakash
Bindiya Thomas Growing 65 pts · Accepted answer

This is a known issue with XLM-R on code-mixed data. The MuRIL preprint has a section specifically comparing these.

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Yogesh Pandey Growing 70 pts · Accepted answer

CSIR-UGC NET preparation: past papers are the most important resource. Everything else is secondary.

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Dinesh Kulkarni Distinguished 730 pts · Accepted answer

Overleaf + GitHub integration is underrated. You get version control and collaboration in one place.

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Wajid Khan Growing 110 pts · Accepted answer

As a senior faculty member (25 years in the system), I want to offer a different perspective. Yes, the pressures are real. But I have also seen the other side: students who produce excellent work, publish honestly, and build reputations over time. The system is imperfect but not entirely broken.

What has actually helped my students: choosing venues carefully (a few strong papers rather than many weak ones), developing genuine collaborations rather than transactional coauthorships.

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Pooja Nambiar Growing 115 pts · Accepted answer

This is a known issue with XLM-R on code-mixed data. The MuRIL preprint has a section specifically comparing these.

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Kiran Yadav Growing 130 pts · Accepted answer

FDR (Benjamini-Hochberg) is widely accepted and preferable to Bonferroni when you have many tests and limited power. The key is to be explicit about which correction you used and why.

On replication: No independent cohort is a genuine limitation but not a dealbreaker for rare disease research, where cohort availability is a known constraint. Many high-quality papers acknowledge this and still get published in good journals. Frame it as future work.

Power analysis: Yes, report it. Showing you are aware of the limitation is better than not mentioning it.

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Jagdish Rawat · Accepted answer

The ethics review situation in Indian universities is actually more complex than most people realize.

There is no uniform national framework equivalent to the US Common Rule. Each institution has its own Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) or Institutional Review Board (IRB).

For anonymous survey research with no identifiable data and no vulnerable populations: most Indian IECs would classify this as exempt, but 'exempt' still needs a formal determination from the IEC.it is not self-certifying.

My practical advice: go to your institution's research ethics office now, describe what you did, and request an exempt determination in writing. Better to have documentation than to discover the issue during thesis review.

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Ashwin Murthy Distinguished 560 pts · 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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Replying to Ashwin Murthy
Karthik Rajan Growing 180 pts · Accepted answer

Overleaf + GitHub integration is underrated. You get version control and collaboration in one place.

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Ishaan Verma Growing 60 pts · Accepted answer

I found that writing a paper abstract first (before the paper) and then reverse-engineering the paper from the abstract helped with clarity enormously.

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Sanjay Kumar Growing 145 pts · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

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Replying to Sanjay Kumar
Eshan Patil Growing 70 pts · Accepted answer

For longitudinal data with missing values, mixed-effects models handle this more gracefully than imputation in most cases.

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Suresh Iyer · Accepted answer

Overleaf + GitHub integration is underrated. You get version control and collaboration in one place.

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Lakshmi Devi Growing 75 pts · Accepted answer

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

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Replying to Lakshmi Devi
Tara Singh Starting 5 pts · Accepted answer

This is a known issue with XLM-R on code-mixed data. The MuRIL preprint has a section specifically comparing these.

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Replying to Lakshmi Devi
Sowmya Narayanan Active 310 pts · Accepted answer

Highly recommend checking out the PMRF portal for the actual numbers.they update the stipend structure annually.

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Replying to Lakshmi Devi
Rekha Shetty Starting 40 pts · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed. Thank you so much.I have been going back and forth on this for weeks and this clears it up completely.