Welcoming Iris.ai 6.0.

Map subscriptions, BibTex exports, patents, dark mode and algorithm improvements – and some changes to free and premium versions.

It’s that time yet again – last night we pushed out some new and exciting changes to the academic tools! There’s a long feature list below, some of which (including map subscription and BibTex export) are long time favourite feature requests. We hope you enjoy them!

The main change with this launch is in the logic of free and premium accounts. We’ve made some choices on this front driven by a few reasons: a) We’ve now properly established ourselves with an offering toward university libraries, and found a collaboration model that universities can afford and that we can live with. That means more and more users are coming in through University licenses and have access to the full premium tools, which makes us very happy! b) We see that the decidedly best experience one can have with the tools is to have access to it all. c) At the same time, we wanted to give free users the ability to get a feeling for all of the tools, not just the Explore tool.

In short, as a free user we’re limiting some more of the features in the Explore tool, but opening up the ability to try out the Focus tool as well – and we’re starting to Beta test an individual payment model, if you want easy access to all of the tools and features! (Send an email to order@iris.ai for more information)

With that said, let’s dig into the details. The ability to use the tools without being registered even with a free account is heavily reduced. You can engage with shared Exploration maps and Focus studies, but you can not create them nor edit them.

For free user accounts, we chosen to limit some features including the ability to input your own problem statement and search in patents. You will see the Focus tool now being available in your account, and be able to import single Explore maps into a Focus study.

To see the full breakdown of free versus premium tools, go to iris.ai/accounts.

If you urgently miss some of the features we have had to remove from the Free tools, or want full access to the features of your new Focus tool, there are two ways to go about it: 1) Talk to your librarian about getting the entire university/department access to our tools or 2) Contact order@iris.ai to inquire about individual premium access.

New features

Dark mode: Let’s face it – we’re all different, and we figured we’d add a neat little feature for those of you who prefer the darker side of life. Toggle on dark mode on top of the left hand menu for a new Iris.ai experience.

Subscribe to maps: Have you built the perfect map that contains state of the art of what you need, and would love for us to let you know whenever new relevant content is found? It’s one of our most requested features and it’s here! Subscribe to your favourite maps and receive notifications whenever the content change with new relevant papers.

Easier content selection: Do you want to search by patents, papers, or both? This is now a lot easier to choose – either as you input your research question or starting paper, or in the map itself, which will regenerate the map.

Export your map results: Another highly cited request – this feature allows you to export the list of papers in your result map as a .csv file, or in BibTex format for uploading to your favourite reference manager system.

Bye-bye, TED talks! When we started building Iris.ai, we found a fun way to build something that made sense and demonstrated our intention and vision – but that didn’t require the full capability of reading millions of research papers. The concept we launched early 2016 was “see the science around a TED talk” and allowed you to pop a TED link into the tool, Iris.ai would machine read the script and show you a science map. Years later, while we will care deeply for our little hack, we figured it was time to retire support for this practically unused feature. So goodbye, little TED-Science-tool, it was a pleasure having you with us!

Algorithmic and capability improvements. We keep on improving the core engine, and the new improvements this time around are connected to an improved keyword extractor module (using tf-idf to propose candidates for key words, and then topic modeling to evaluate the relevance of those candidates) and the first part of better word disambiguation (w2v, currently disambiguating on part-of-speech, which helps finding better synonyms for e.g. words that are both noun and verb or other variations), and a new algorithm for hierarchy building to create smarter concept maps for the Explore tools (uses not only topic information and similarity, but also generality and concept dependencies to form the final output), freshly tuned hyperparameters that give better results overall – and some general system performance upgrades and updates.