AI-mediated forms of guruship are proliferating across South Asia and beyond, yet they have scarcely begun to receive sustained scholarly attention. This article takes their emergence as an occasion to revisit the conceptual vocabulary through which guruship has been understood, asking what becomes of ‘guru logics’ after artificial intelligence. AI gurus are not merely technological curiosities; nor are they straightforward successors to human gurus. This article treats them as analytic provocations through which longstanding conceptions of guruship can themselves be reconsidered. Guru studies had already been grappling with many of the problems that AI now makes newly conspicuous: imitation and performativity; presence in absence; distributed and non-human personhood; the mediation of charisma; embodiment and its displacement; succession and charismatic continuity. AI therefore strains an existing conceptual repertoire while also showing what it can still do. The article develops the notions of ‘code-born syncretism’ and ‘ambient guruship’, alongside ‘Transhuman Guru Worlding’ and ‘guru cosmoi’, to explore what happens when the guru becomes generative and responsive. ‘Doctrine by interface’ further draws attention to the ways theological possibilities are shaped through the design and affordances of AI systems, while ‘simulation as method’ considers what experimental encounters with such systems might contribute to the ethnographic study of guruship. These concepts are developed through discussions of devotional recombination, embodiment, programmed continuity of the guru after death or exile, and the political economies within which AI gurus are made and encountered. The article takes up histories in which the guru has already exceeded the bounded human body, becoming distributed through multiple material and mediated forms, and examines how generative interaction and recombination rework these inherited guru logics, while letting these forms scale and personalise in novel ways. What emerges is therefore neither unprecedented rupture nor straightforward continuity, but a recursive transformation of existing forms of guruship through computational mediation. The article offers a conceptual framework and analytic repertoire for an emerging field of ethnographic inquiry rather than a completed ethnography of AI guruship. Its larger proposition is that AI gurus matter for more than what they might tell us about religion in an age of artificial intelligence. They also provide an unusual vantage point from which to return to the conceptual problems that have long animated guru studies and to ask what artificial intelligence allows us to see differently about guruship itself.
Various recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) system failures, some of which have made the global headlines, have highlighted issues in these systems. These failures have resulted in calls for more ethical AI systems that better take into account their effects on various stakeholders. However, implementing AI ethics into practice is still an on-going challenge. High-level guidelines for doing so exist, devised by governments and private organizations alike, but lack practicality for developers. To address this issue, in this paper, we present a method for implementing AI ethics. The method, ECCOLA, has been iteratively developed using a cyclical action design research approach. The method aims at making the high-level AI ethics principles more practical, making it possible for developers to more easily implement them in practice.
Ville Vakkuri, Kai-Kristian Kemell, P. Abrahamsson· EUROMICRO Conference on Soft...· 64 citations· ⚡6
In this paper, we present a novel approach to improving software quality and efficiency through a Large Language Model (LLM)-based model designed to review code and identify potential issues. Our proposed LLM-based AI agent model is trained on large code repositories. This training includes code reviews, bug reports, and documentation of best practices. It aims to detect code smells, identify potential bugs, provide suggestions for improvement, and optimize the code. Unlike traditional static code analysis tools, our LLM-based AI agent has the ability to predict future potential risks in the code. This supports a dual goal of improving code quality and enhancing developer education by encouraging a deeper understanding of best practices and efficient coding techniques. Furthermore, we explore the model's effectiveness in suggesting improvements that significantly reduce post-release bugs and enhance code review processes, as evidenced by an analysis of developer sentiment toward LLM feedback. For future work, we aim to assess the accuracy and efficiency of LLM-generated documentation updates in comparison to manual methods. This will involve an empirical study focusing on manually conducted code reviews to identify code smells and bugs, alongside an evaluation of best practice documentation, augmented by insights from developer discussions and code reviews. Our goal is to not only refine the accuracy of our LLM-based tool but also to underscore its potential in streamlining the software development lifecycle through proactive code improvement and education.
Z. Rasheed, Malik Abdul Sami, Muhammad Waseem et al.· arXiv.org· 62 citations· ⚡3
Molecular dynamics simulations hold great promise for providing insight into the microscopic behavior of complex molecular systems. However, their effectiveness is often constrained by long timescales associated with rare events. Enhanced sampling methods have been developed to address these challenges, and recent years have seen a growing integration with machine learning techniques. This Review provides a comprehensive overview of how they are reshaping the field, with a particular focus on the data-driven construction of collective variables. Furthermore, these techniques have also improved biasing schemes and unlocked novel strategies via reinforcement learning and generative approaches. In addition to methodological advances, we highlight applications spanning different areas, such as biomolecular processes, ligand binding, catalytic reactions, and phase transitions. We conclude by outlining future directions aimed at enabling more automated strategies for rare-event sampling.
Kai Zhu, Enrico Trizio, Jintu Zhang et al.· Chemical Reviews· 54 citations
In agile software development, maintaining high-quality user stories is crucial, but also challenging. This study explores the use of large language models to automatically improve the user story quality in Austrian Post Group IT agile teams. We developed a reference model for an Autonomous LLM-based Agent System and implemented it at the company. The quality of user stories in the study and the effectiveness of these agents for user story quality improvement was assessed by 11 participants across six agile teams. Our findings demonstrate the potential of LLMs in improving user story quality, contributing to the research on AI role in agile development, and providing a practical example of the transformative impact of AI in an industry setting.
Zheying Zhang, M. Rayhan, Tomas Herda et al.· International Conference on...· 48 citations· ⚡4
Systematic literature review (SLR) is foundational to evidence-based research, enabling scholars to identify, classify, and synthesize existing studies to address specific research questions. Conducting an SLR is, however, largely a manual process. In recent years, researchers have made significant progress in automating portions of the SLR pipeline to reduce the effort and time required for high-quality reviews; nevertheless, there remains a lack of AI-agent-based systems that automate the entire SLR workflow. To this end, we introduce a novel multi-AI-agent system designed to fully automate SLRs. Leveraging large language models (LLMs), our system streamlines the review process to enhance efficiency and accuracy. Through a user-friendly interface, researchers specify a topic; the system then generates a search string to retrieve relevant academic papers. Next, an inclusion/exclusion filtering step is applied to titles relevant to the research area. The system subsequently summarizes paper abstracts and retains only those directly related to the field of study. In the final phase, it conducts a thorough analysis of the selected papers with respect to predefined research questions. This paper presents the system, describes its operational framework, and demonstrates how it substantially reduces the time and effort traditionally required for SLRs while maintaining comprehensiveness and precision. The code for this project is available at: https://github.com/GPT-Laboratory/SLR-automation .
Malik Abdul Sami, Z. Rasheed, Kai-Kristian Kemell et al.· arXiv.org· 43 citations· ⚡2
Context: Manual qualitative data analysis is time-intensive and can compromise validity and replicability, affecting analysis design, implementation, and reporting. Large Language Models (LLMs) enable human-bot collaboration in Software Engineering (SE), but their potential for qualitative data analysis in SE remains largely unexplored. Objective: The objective of this study is to design and develop an LLM-based multi-agent system that synergizes human decision support with AI to automate various qualitative data analysis approaches. Methods: We used LLM-based multi-agents systems to assist the qualitative data analysis process, deploying 27 agents, each responsible for a specific task, such as text summarization, initial code generation, and extracting themes and patterns. Results: The main findings are: (1) the LLM-based multi-agent system accelerates the qualitative data analysis process, (2) the system effectively automates tasks such as text summarization, initial code generation, and theme extraction, and (3) the publicly accessible code facilitates validation and further evaluation. Conclusion: The proposed LLM-based multi-agent system automates qualitative data analysis process, creating opportunities for researchers and practitioners. Future improvements focus on enhancing multilingual performance and integrating continuous expert feedback. The source code of proposed system and system details can be found here: https://github.com/GPT-Laboratory/Qualitative-Analysis-with-an-LLM-Based-Agentts
Z. Rasheed, Muhammad Waseem, Aakash Ahmad et al.· arXiv.org· 40 citations
A new method, called CW-Net, translates the reasoning process of an autonomous vehicle’s AI system into understandable concepts that explain its behavior.