KadiAssistant: A conversational AI Agent for information retrieval in Kadi4Mat
We introduce KadiAssistant, a privacy-by-design AI assistant integrated into the Kadi research data ecosystem, enabling researchers to efficiently access, aggregate, and synthesize information from heterogeneous, privacy-sensitive research data. Interdisciplinary fields such as materials science bring together disciplines with their own terminology and standards. While this convergence fuels innovation, it also makes it increasingly difficult to connect and access knowledge, as data are distributed across disciplines, organizations, and individuals. For example, battery research combines electrochemical measurements, materials characterization data, physics-based simulations, and manufacturing parameters, each using different formats, vocabularies, and standards. Efficiently storing and sharing such heterogeneous data via research data platforms, such as Kadi4Mat, demands domain knowledge, technical expertise, and familiarity with metadata schemas and interfaces. Research data also vary in sensitivity: newly generated 'warm' data are often private, whereas published 'cold' data are usually openly accessible. The Kadi ecosystem offers fine-grained access control needed for sensitive data. A solution for efficient information retrieval in Kadi must therefore respect the fine-grained access permissions. To address these intertwined challenges of information retrieval, strong data privacy, and complex access control, KadiAssistant combines a self-hosted large language model (LLM) with a privacy-preserving semantic search, inspired by retrieval-augmented generation, that can access files and record metadata on Kadi. This allows the assistant to screen, aggregate, and structure information into a highly informative answer. KadiAssistant therefore bridges terminology and standards, lowers access barriers for researchers, and strengthens the Findable pillar of FAIR data principles.