Clarification Regarding AI chatbot to explore modeling resources in biology

[mateenasadaf]

Hello @vcellmike
I am a 3rd year Bachelor of Engineering student with a keen interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) as well as Machine Learning (ML). I have begun exploring the VCell-AI project for GSoC by cloning the repository and running the platform within Docker locally, in order to familiarize myself with the overall workflow and architecture.

AI/ML systems are my passion and I have worked on numerous ML projects for my coursework and participated in many hackathons.

LLM (Large Language Model) driven components of this project excite me the most. These include but are not limited to: prompt creation, knowledge base retrieval and exploration of models via natural language.

While reviewing the code, I started to look at how the chat bot interacts with the VCell API and how the knowledge base is utilized to generate responses.

At this point I am currently trying to develop an in-depth understanding of the AI pipeline including how prompts, retrieval and formatting are connected from the backend to the frontend of the system.

Before going deeper I wanted to reach out for your advice on:

Where would you recommend a new contributor start if they wanted to familiarize themselves with the AI pipeline more thoroughly?
Are there smaller tasks related to prompt creation, retrieval and formatting that would be appropriate for a first contribution?

I am currently strengthening my understanding of LLM architectures and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), as I believe they are directly relevant to improving VCell-AI’s knowledge retrieval and response quality.

I’m very interested in contributing and continuing to learn while working on this project. Thank you!

Best regards
MATEENA SADAF
[email protected]

linked in:https://www.linkedin.com/in/mateena-sadaf/
github: https://github.com/mateenasadaf