\n<\/p>\n
Anuja Uppuluri used to spend a lot of time scrolling social media apps dictated by algorithms designed to keep users glued to their screens no matter how mind-numbing the content.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always had something else that I could be doing or wanted to be doing, but I was choosing to watch TikTok videos for five hours,\u201d said Uppuluri, who completed a bachelor\u2019s degree in information systems at Carnegie Mellon University in May. \u201cAnd then by the end of it I couldn’t remember anything that I had watched.\u201d<\/p>\n
Uppuluri, who now works as a machine learning engineer for Anthropic, sought to become more intentional about the information she consumes and has since scaled back her social media usage. Rather than scroll aimlessly, she wanted to fill her time digesting more research related to her career field, especially about the inner workings and implications of increasingly prevalent generative artificial intelligence tools.<\/p>\n
She discovered all types of academic papers, articles and blog posts she wanted to read, but it wasn\u2019t easy to keep organized. \u201cI didn\u2019t know where to put all of this stuff, because there\u2019s no central location for it,\u201d Uppuluri told Inside Higher Ed<\/em>. \u201cI started thinking about how I want to use my research and what I want to see from other people\u2019s research.\u201d<\/p>\n So Uppuluri developed Paper Trails, which she described as \u201cGoodreads for academic papers\u201d in an X post announcing the website\u2019s launch last week. \u201cI built it because I wanted a place where engaging with research felt fun, beautiful, and personal to you.\u201d<\/p>\n Similar to the book-focused website Goodreads, Paper Trails is designed to help users discover new research and ideas, though it\u2019s not powered by an AI algorithm. It\u2019s a crowd-sourced platform where users can post links to papers from any field, peruse summaries of those papers, create shelves (public reading lists), and comment, review or rate papers.<\/p>\n In the week since its public debut, Paper Trails has grown its users from 10 to 2,200; the number of articles available on the site has increased from 20 to 3,100.<\/p>\n Inside Higher Ed<\/em> spoke with Uppuluri to hear more about her vision for Paper Trails.<\/p>\n (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)<\/em><\/p>\n Q: What sparked your interest in reading more academic research, especially about computer science and AI?<\/strong><\/p>\n A:<\/strong> I always thought of a computer scientist as someone who writes code, builds infrastructure and makes sure systems are built to scale. But AI is blurring the line between research and engineering. Every new discovery that comes out of a large language model (LLM) lab is research-oriented.<\/p>\n Understanding why the technology is the way it is can be done by reading papers and understanding the research about large language models. These models are like black boxes\u2014you can\u2019t entirely understand what\u2019s going on inside it\u2014and that\u2019s created all of the research subfields. For example, a subfield called interpretability is about trying to interpret what the models are doing. The more you do with these models, the more you have to read to understand how they work to gain context on how to build things better.<\/p>\n Q: How did your previous experiences reading and writing research papers inform the creation of Paper Trails?<\/strong><\/p>\n A:<\/strong> A research paper to me used to mean something related to medicine, chemistry or biology. I didn\u2019t understand or realize that it had a place in computer science until a few months before I wrote the only research paper I did in college. For that paper, I wrote the methodology and code, but my co-author, who was doing his Ph.D., helped me structure the paper, write the references and get it through the formatting process. It felt like a high barrier to entry for doing and reading research, which I associated with work instead of fun.<\/p>\n I thought having some type of casual thing like [Paper Trails] to organize research papers would maybe help me read more. But other existing websites I experimented with looked so dated and used software I had to learn. It looked complicated and didn\u2019t seem fun. I also didn\u2019t want to organize my research in a big Google Doc that has 50 links on it that I\u2019m never going to touch again\u2014that looks ugly.<\/p>\n So, I knew I could probably make my own site that looks nice and is easy to use.<\/p>\n At its core, Paper Trails is a tool to put papers and other reading material together in a way that\u2019s pretty and fun. Sometimes that\u2019s what you need to make something feel more like a hobby rather than more work you have to do.<\/p>\n Q: What went into developing the Paper Trails website and how does it work?<\/strong><\/p>\n A:<\/strong> I coded most of it from scratch, with the exception of pasting in a few codes to fix some bugs.<\/p>\n When I first launched, there were only around 20 papers on the site. Now, there\u2019s around 3,000 just from more people being on the site and adding the things that they want to read.<\/p>\n I chose not to mass import a bunch of stuff at the outset because if people look at it and it\u2019s not something they\u2019re interested in, it\u2019s still there. It\u2019s kind of cool to look at every single paper and know that it\u2019s there because it\u2019s something on someone else\u2019s reading list.<\/p>\n Everything on the main page is organized by publication date. You can also use keywords to search or just click some buttons to see what people are logging. There is no personalized algorithm for users. While there isn\u2019t anything necessarily wrong with a recommendation assistant, it\u2019s also nice when there\u2019s nothing telling you what to look at.<\/p>\n Q: What is the value of Paper Trails for its users?<\/strong><\/p>\n A:<\/strong> There\u2019s a lot of people who would like to get into research or just reading more. And if you want to spend your time in that way, having a tool to help you do it and encourage you to do makes it a lot easier to follow through on.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also value coming from all the people that make it a collaborative thing. It allows people to explore, kind of like going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. You can just keep clicking on random links and reading. You don\u2019t know what you\u2019re going to learn at the start of your session but, if you\u2019re interested in it, you can read it.<\/p>\n Q: Now that people are showing interest, what are the next steps for Paper Trails?<\/strong><\/p>\n A:<\/strong> I was thinking about sending it to some of my old professors, especially if they have Ph.D. students who may be interested in working on it.<\/p>\n There are even more elements that I could add that would improve the user experience. A lot of people have papers that are already saved on another site, so being able to bulk import would be helpful. Or allowing a few people to edit a shelf rather than just one person could make collaboration a little bit better. Or being able to clone somebody\u2019s shelf so that another user can add some of their own stuff to it.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know exactly what growth looks like. But to me, success means the people using it are happy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Anuja Uppuluri used to spend a lot of time scrolling social media apps dictated by algorithms designed to keep users glued to their screens no matter how mind-numbing the content. \u201cI always had something else that I could be doing or wanted to be doing, but I was choosing to watch TikTok videos for five<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37751,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[14438,20803,3295,10246,3141,2292],"class_list":{"0":"post-37750","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-collective","9":"tag-doomscrolling","10":"tag-join","11":"tag-paper","12":"tag-research","13":"tag-sick"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37750\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}