Leverage AI for Academic Work With a Personal Research Information Management System
AI is making it easier to produce research. It is also making it harder to keep up with the research you need to understand.
More papers, including AI-assisted papers, arrive every day. Meanwhile, academics who use AI well can work faster, raising the pressure on everyone else to publish, secure grants, and remain visible in their field.
You could use AI to summarise papers or ask it to write for you. But that rarely produces good results, leaves you with outputs you don't fully understand, and makes you heavily dependent on AI.
Using AI carelessly can damage your academic reputation.
This webinar presents a different approach: use AI to manage and work with information, while you retain the judgement, understanding, and creativity behind your research.
In three steps, you will learn how to build an AI-assisted information management system that supports your work for years.
The 3-step solution
1. Using the Obsidian app, you build a local, private "Wikipedia for your own research". You record every idea you encounter in your own words, linked to the sources that back it up. Nothing is ever forgotten, and it keeps growing as long as you keep working.
2. An AI gets access to it. Access is restricted and regulated, so your thinking never mixes with the AI's output. It can answer questions across your entire knowledge base and point you back to the exact source behind every line.
3. With a set of skills, methods and connectors, the AI drafts papers from your own material, generates new angles, and documents experiments at record speed.
The result is a complete information management system that scales over years and gets stronger as AI improves. It makes you faster and more thorough, but it is not a one-click, AI-does-it-for-me solution. Each side does what it does best: your intuition decides what matters, digital storage remembers everything, and AI makes sense of a volume of information no person could hold in their head. You get the leverage, and you keep cognitive sovereignty over your own field.
Who is this webinar for?
Everyone working in research or studying at a university.
Students and early-career academics will learn how to store what they learn, learn more quickly, and use that knowledge throughout their careers.
Senior academics will learn an AI-assisted knowledge management system that works with their existing papers, PDFs, and notes and supports research project management.
Professional researchers at governmental, non-profit, or other institutions
Speaker
Ilya Shabanov finished his PhD in just 2.5 years with four first-author papers, despite having no formal training in the field before he enrolled. His strategy was a set of information-management methods most students never hear about, and universities do not teach.
Over five years, he built a personal Wikipedia of his research: hundreds of papers and more than 500,000 words of notes, refining his digital note-taking method. With the advent of AI, all of that information is now available for blazing-fast literature reviews and paper drafting. To share the method he founded EffortlessAcademic.com during his PhD and engaged thousands of academics and students in numerous webinars and courses.
His mission is to keep advancing the method and teach it at universities and companies worldwide, making academia more effortless, enjoyable, and impactful.
Testimonials Previous Courses
"This course is a game changer for everyone who takes notes and wants to use the notes. The use starts with simply retrieval - you can actually find what you are looking for. And for connecting ideas, the world is at your feet. In my humble opinion this course is very useful not only for phd-students and professional researchers but also for the 'amateurs' and parttime students and the curious minds. The technology will change but the basic ideas and principles remain useful for many years to come."
-Willem Krijgsman, architect & student
"Ilya’s AI Agents course completely transformed my Obsidian workflow. Through sharp, step-by-step video instruction, he demystifies complex integrations, showing you exactly how to deploy agents across both your local vault and the broader web. The payoff is immediate: buried connections surface effortlessly, turning Obsidian into a genuinely proactive second brain. Crucially, the system amplifies output without diluting ownership — you remain completely in command of your voice, perspective, and ideas."
- Prof. Nigel Andrew, Southern Cross University