Zendy Co-founder Kamran Kardan interview with Asian Business Review
Dec 9, 2022 |
5 Mins ReadThe Middle East startup landscape is buzzing with breakthrough innovation and creativity. Zendy is proud to play a role in the ecosystem of MENA-based startups and we're thrilled to accept the award for Best Startup - Education at the Middle East Technology Excellence Awards.
Zendy Co-founder Kamran Kardan recently sat down with Asian Business Review to accept the award and discuss Zendy's mission, vision, and values.
Kamran commenced the interview by giving a big shoutout to the Zendy team for their tireless commitment to Zendy's mission of providing affordable and accessible academic content to knowledge enthusiasts globally.
Zendy: knowledge without barriers
In 2019, Zendy embarked on an ambitious journey to offer an alternative model of access to scholarly literature. The traditional pay-per-article model was and still is increasingly unattainable for individuals and researchers, especially in emerging regions where access is already limited.
Looking at the success of the subscription market, namely products like Netflix and Spotify, Zendy founders thought why not offer the same experience for users to discover academic literature? Thus, Zendy was born. Zendy is an affordable academic library that offers unlimited access to journals, articles, e-books, proceedings, and more for the monthly price of a single research paper.
With Zendy, students, researchers, and professionals can read, cite, and download leading research. The added benefit of Zendy is saving money, traditional models of access force individuals to pay between $15 - $40 per research paper.
What does the future of academic access look like?
When asked about the future of Zendy and what's next, Kamran Kardan spoke of Zendy mission which is to continue to reduce inequalities of access to knowledge. As a firm supporter of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Zendy (a product of Knowledge E), is working hard to reach new emerging regions.
To strengthen its mission of creating a global knowledge economy without barriers, in October 2021, Zendy launched its free Open Access platform. Zendy Open features over 43 million free Open Access publications on one easy-to-use platform.
With the support of leading publishers, Zendy's growth is a collaborative effort, and the next 12 months will be defining for the company. In September 2022, Zendy launched in Nigeria and has since acquired over 7,000 from the booming African region.
"We're grateful to be recognised as a leading EduTech Startup in MENA and we're inspired by the many other innovators in the industry who are using technology to make a positive impact in communities globally. The team is currently working on significant updates to the Zendy experience and we're so excited to launch new features in Q1 2023. Day by day we inch closer to our mission of creating a world where everyone, everywhere can access knowledge without barriers," said Zendy Co-founder Kamran Kardan.
Click here to watch the full interview: https://bit.ly/3PcgxPB
Zendy Announces New Version Releases of ZAIA - AI Assistant
United Arab Emirates, 13th March 2024 - AI-powered research library Zendy has announced the launch of a significant version release for its domain-specific Large Language Model (LMM), ZAIA (Zendy AI Assistant). Developed by Zendy’s data science team and initially launched in December 2023, ZAIA is designed to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of research discovery and literature review. In this new version, a host of new features have been introduced to support researchers: Ask ZAIA: You can now ask specific questions to ZAIA on a paper level, giving you a new way to conduct in-depth analysis during literature review. PDF Analysis: ZAIA can now analyse any PDF. Upload or link a research paper with sections, and ZAIA will extract, analyse, and summarise each section, including the abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, and references. Reference validation and verification: using techniques such as chain of verification, all references go through a validation and verification process to increase accuracy. Conversation and analysis history: once you log in, you can now see a complete history of all conversations with ZAIA and a history of PDFs analysed. An enhanced fine-tuned model for increased accuracy. ZAIA is also now accessible without registration. ZAIA is not a general-purpose language model. It is fine-tuned with Zendy’s own data sources, allowing it to support higher-level abstractions for research-specific use cases. “ZAIA 0.1 takes us closer to our vision of creating an ecosystem of research-centric AI tools using the latest development methods that increase efficiency and reliability. The future of research is intertwined with the vast capabilities of AI, and we are committed to leveraging the best of AI to provide solutions to the pressing issues researchers face in research discovery,” said Zendy’s Chief Technology Officer, Rodrigo Pinto. “We have a core focus on increasing collaboration with publishers and data providers to navigate the increasing potential of AI. We look forward to extending the vast capabilities of our LLM and all our learnings to institutions, publishers, and organisations looking to streamline information discovery and retrieval using AI,” said Zendy Co-founder Kamran Kardan. Committed to helping foster an ecosystem of collaborative partnerships rooted in responsible AI practices, Zendy believes AI is important in fostering an equitable research and publishing ecosystem, but only with ethical guidelines. In response to the growing discussion around AI, Zendy recently released a list of AI imperatives to guide strategic development and the integration of AI technologies. To find out more about Zendy’s AI solutions, email hello@zendy.io. You can use ZAIA now on Zendy, visit www.zendy.io/zaia. To read the Zendy AI Imperatives statement, click here. About Zendy Zendy is a product of Knowledge E. Since its inception in 2019, Zendy has introduced over 500,000 users to a better way to research. Zendy’s intuitive AI-powered research library features millions of journals, articles, e-books, and more, allowing users to access unlimited content for an affordable monthly subscription. Zendy also offers a free open-access plan. Press contact: Monica Chinsami Head of Marketing
Zendy and IntechOpen's Joint Webinar: Addressing Accessibility, Discoverability and a Sustainable Future.
We hosted a joint webinar with IntechOpen in November that addressed emerging technologies across different industries that contribute to sustainability and research accessibility and discovery. The webinar was titled, “Emerging Technologies - Partnering for Accessibility, Discoverability and a Sustainable Future.” The session featured 3 key speakers, Dr. Jo Havemann representing AfricArXiv, Professor Tatiana Morosuk from Technical University of Berlin and Zendy’s Head of Marketing, Monica Chinsami. Each speaker articulated how their organisation works to increase sustainable practices through research dissemination. Zendy’s Head of Marketing, Monica Chinsami highlighted our library’s initiatives to advance the accessibility and discoverability of scholarly literature. In an effort to break geographical barriers in research, Zendy partners with leading publishers to ensure their content reaches regions with limited access via our global subscription. Additionally, Professor Tatiana Morosuk from the Technical University of Berlin placed emphasis on the transionary period the energy sector is experiencing as it moves away from fossil fuel and towards technology focused on sustainability. The professor stated the importance of innovation to advance sustainable practices and energy use. Finally, Dr. Jo Havemann stated how AfricArXiv is on a mission to make African research more discoverable as this is in line with SDG 4 (Quality Education), the organisation announced their collaboration with Ubuntunet which is a network provider that assists with connectivity and infrastructure for research and education institutions. Advancing research dissemination catalyses SDG 4 (Quality Education) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities). As equitable research platforms emerge and partner to expand their reach, the more academic research is democratised to create knowledgable societies. We look forward to hosting more webinars in 2024, to tackle and highlight the initiatives in the world of academia. Discover millions of e-books, journal articles, proceedings and more on Zendy now.
Zendy Launches ZAIA, a Domain-Specific AI Assistant
United Arab Emirates, 15 December 2023 - AI-powered research library, Zendy, announced the launch of its AI Assistant, ZAIA, a domain-specific Large Language Model (LMM) developed by Zendy’s data science team. ZAIA (short for Zendy AI Assistant) exists to help researchers quickly understand key research concepts and discover research papers that specifically link to inputs. These two functions enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the literature review process. You can ask any research-related question, and ZAIA will analyse millions of academic research papers to give you credible answers backed by references. Unlike general-purpose language models, ZAIA is trained with Zendy’s own data. In the future, it can also query, in real-time, additional sources from publisher data that are not available on the public domain. There is growing recognition of the necessity for domain-specific solutions to strengthen the credibility of data. Fine tuning models on domain-specific data narrows down the LLM’s focus to improve performance in a defined context, thus reducing the likelihood of hallucinations. “We developed ZAIA to advance the usage of AI on research platforms and improve the research discovery process for researchers. ZAIA aims to assist readers on Zendy by quickly solving research-related questions. ZAIA stands out from other AI products as it is fed real-time data and information available on Zendy, which is then fine-tuned to efficiently cater to our users,” said Zendy’s Head of Technology, Rodrigo Pinto. “The first iteration of our LLM, ZAIA, is our unique AI offering for Zendy users who can now leverage the best of AI to improve their research discovery process. This is a very exciting milestone for Zendy and we look forward to the feedback from our valued users,” said Zendy Co-founder Kamran Kardan. Committed to helping foster an ecosystem of collaborative partnerships rooted in responsible AI practices, Zendy’s Large Language Model is built to be entirely customisable. It has the capacity to learn from diverse datasets with integration made simple through Restful API’s or Websocket APIs. “Bigger picture, our technology presents limitless potential for organisations and institutions yet to integrate the power of LLMs into their workflows. The potential is immeasurable, with use cases including on-demand tutoring, psychology support services, employee onboarding, the list goes on,” continued Kamran Kardan. To find out more about Zendy’s AI solutions email hello@zendy.io. You can use ZAIA now on Zendy. To access, log in or sign up to Zendy: www.zendy.io.