March 18, 2025
Boosting research impact with AI-powered seminars
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Atom hosted the third installment of our 12-part series dedicated to exploring the ways in which technology is transforming the research enterprise. The webinar featured Dr. Ben Kaube, the co-founder of Cassyni, and Tomer du Sautoy, co-founder of Atom Grants, and centered on new ways for the research community to improve knowledge exchange, build global networks, and leverage new technology to engage funding bodies, collaborators, and broader audiences. Below is a recap of the key insights, along with news on upcoming features from Atom’s new end-to-end pre-award management platform.
Dr. Ben Kaube is the co-founder of Cassyni, a platform for seminar organizers that enables academics to discover and share scholarly research via interactive seminars and video recordings. Before launching Cassyni, Ben created Kopernio, a tool that simplifies access to academic papers, and Newsflo, a media monitoring tool for impact metrics.
Dr. Kaube earned his Ph.D. in computational physics at Imperial College London and was named a Forbes “30 Under 30” in Science and Healthcare in 2020.
Hosting this webinar is Tomer du Sautoy, the CEO/co-founder of Atom Grants. With a MSc in Physics from the University of Bristol, Tomer has firsthand experience navigating the complexities of academic research and funding. Through Atom Grants, Tomer aims to streamline research administration, making funding opportunities more accessible and reducing the administrative burden on institutions.
Dr. Ben Kaube introduced Cassyni, the platform he co-founded to bring seminars into the scholarly record. By integrating seminar videos into the scholarly record, research teams can move beyond the static publication and connect directly with potential collaborators. Dr. Kaube described seminars as the “dark matter” of the academic world: abundant, extremely important for holding research communities together, but not documented in the scholarly record.
Historically, seminars remained a face-to-face affair due to limited technology and the logistical complexity of indexing and preserving audio or video presentations. Modern tools have removed these hurdles: Not only have widely adopted video conferencing tools made virtual attendance straightforward, but improved indexing, persistent identifiers (DOIs), and AI-driven transcript generation now allow recorded seminars to be curated much like journal articles.
Embedding Seminars in the Scholarly Record Cassyni assigns persistent identifiers to seminars, enabling them to be featured in major research databases. Dr. Kaube gave examples of Cassyni’s integration with reference managers like EndNote and platforms like Dimensions, where a seminar about a given paper will appear alongside that paper’s metadata. This makes it simple for users to find and watch and engage with relevant seminars directly within their existing research workflow.
In-Video AI Features A core part of Cassyni is its ability to automatically segment a recorded talk into logical chapters based on slides or major discussion points. References on slides are automatically recognized and made clickable, allowing viewers to jump to the original sources. High-quality transcripts are also generated, supporting quick searches for specific keywords or topics.
Enhanced Engagement & Metrics By publishing seminars online and embedding them in widely accessed tools, Cassyni helps researchers create hubs of global research communities. Institutions can showcase their research and boost impact, as well as track increased downloads and citations that emerge as a direct result of these talks.
If you’d like to learn more or try out Cassyni’s seminar platform, you can visit https://cassyni.com/ to sign up for a free account.
Following Dr. Kaube’s presentation, Tomer shared an update on Atom's new pre-award workflow platform that incorporates the Atom Discovery tools into a comprehensive grant management system.
Key capabilities of this pre-award grant management platform include:
Automated Task Checklists Once a faculty member identifies a grant of interest, Atom generates a set of tasks tied to the specific guidelines of the sponsor. This helps keep deadlines, forms, and sections (e.g. budget narratives or data management plans) clearly organized.
AI-Enhanced Compliance Checks The new AI-driven platform checks required details such as formatting and the accurate completion of documents. It also flags missing components, such as letters of support, to reduce last-minute scrambling.
Collaboration & File Sharing
Atom integrates smoothly with existing document systems so that distributed teams can co-author and revise documents in real time, with updates fed into the system for AI-driven checks and feedback.
Changes in the grant funding landscape mean that more proposals must be submitted to sustain an institution’s research portfolio. With staff resources already stretched, Tomer underscored the need for streamlined, technology-driven solutions that let administrators do more with less. By combining grant discovery and pre-award management features, Atom seeks to reduce the administrative burden on research administrators and increase research development capacity.
For a preview of Atom’s new grant management tools—or to join as a design partner—click here to book a demo or reach out to Tomer.