In 2018 I published a blog about building a cloud-resident “Research Assistant” (RA) chatbot that would be the companion of each scientist. The RA would be responsible for managing scientific data, notes and publication drafts. It could create intelligent summaries and search for important related scientific articles. That post demonstrated a simple prototype that provided spoken English input and simple dialog responses to search for available, relevant research. But it did not address the important issues of data management and textual analysis required to make the RA real. In a short, invited “vision talk” I gave at the e-Science 2019 conference I tried to address the technology that, in 2030, we would need to solve these problems.   This article does not describe an implementation. Rather it is a survey of the missing pieces I alluded to in the talk in terms of the current, related literature.

Introduction

2017 was…