To support the fellows across each phase of the BiTS fellowship, we've designed a tech stack that optimizes for efficient documentation, research synthesis, and idea refinement. Below is an overview of the tools each fellow will be using (this is not exhaustive and technology is changing constantly, so we’re open to suggestions if there’s great tools you’ve discovered):
Communications (Slack)
Our main asynchronous comms platform for the fellowship will be slack. We’ll ask fellows to post updates, share useful materials, coordinate meetings, and generally contribute to the growing community on the workspace. We’ll also use Slack as the dominant method for program comms, weekly reminders, etc.
Data Organization (Google Drive)
Each fellow will have a Google Folder created by the BiTS team. This folder will serve as the central repository for all research, documentation, notes, and final outputs. Fellows are expected to store all finalized documents and research synthesis in their respective Google Drive folders.
General-purpose AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini):
ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini will be your friends throughout the journey, from field exploration to transition. Of course, you have to make sure to double-check any factual claims they make. They still make mistakes, although they do get better by the month. If you want to make sure they stay grounded with respect to facts, use the online mode (not possible with Claude) or upload resources you want to query.
Exploration and Field Mapping
There are great software tools for finding specific experts and mapping and summarizing scientific literatures and patent databases. ChatGPT in online mode is a decent starting point, but there are tools specifically adapted to this task. Examples include Elicit for answering scientific questions and performing literature reviews, Research Rabbit for mapping scientific networks, and Elman for reviews of scientific literature and IP landscape. Elman in particular is a tool with a lot of horsepower. If you learn to use it well for tasks like expert identification and freedom-to-operate analysis, you can go much further than just with Google.
In addition, Deep Research (available via OpenAI, Gemini and DeepSeek at varying and evolving qualities) can perform such synthesis over all available published literature. The results are typically underwhelming when you are an expert in a field, but a great start for quickly orienting yourself in a new field.
AI Tools for Note Taking & Summarization (Exploration and Field Mapping)
There are many tools available to enable your note taking and synthesis. Some of our favorites include Fathom AI, Otter, or Read.AI. BiTS will provide access to a subscription for fellows’ tool of choice to document and capture their Zoom discovery calls during the Field Exploration phase. This tool will:
After recording and synthesizing conversations, fellows will move all notes and research into their Google Drive folder for ongoing use and reference.
Note: Please ensure anyone you interview is made aware that you will be taking notes/recording the calls.
Synthesis (Exploration and Refining Ideas)
In addition to the general-purpose AI chatbots mentioned above, you can use LLM-based tools to interact with large corpuses of texts, websites, audio and video. Claude and ChatGPT both have a ‘Projects’ tool that enables this, but in our opinion, NotebookLM by Google really shines here with the ability to integrate up to 50 resources without major loss in performance. There are also open-source tools like LlamaIndex, and note-taking apps are often starting to integrate AI synthesis tools (e.g. Notion AI). These tools will come in particularly handy once you’ve accumulated a body of research papers, patents and call recording transcripts.