Our team

The Advance: Life training app is designed by experienced biomedical knowledge experts:
-Our team includes tenured scientists from one of the most rigorous fields where data is often validated prior to publication. One of us even developed a validation tool.
-Collectively, we've published extensively in peer-reviewed scientific journals, including esteemed publications such as Nature.
-Our credentials extend to securing numerous research grants.
-Beyond research, we're educators at a university, specializing in scientific methods and their rigor, and scientific writing.
-Our commitment to science and its rigor is further reflected in our extensive peer-review contributions for both national funding agencies and premier academic journals.

Please note, while the app is an initiative under Knowledge Advances Inc., a nonprofit organization, it operates independently of the university with which we're affiliated. The university has no association or involvement with the app. Currently, Knowledge Advances Inc. operates as a Sole Member Nonprofit (in Nevada) and is not yet a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. 

This Advance app is offered free of charge and contains no ads, underscoring our dedication to unbiased information dissemination. Furthermore, the app’s development was self-funded and is also devoid of external influences from governments, corporations, industries, or institutions. These measures reinforce one of the app’s core messages about the influence of profit-driven motives and potential conflicts of interest on content.

If you resonate with the mission of the Advance app and Knowledge Advances Inc. and wish to support us further, please get in touch. You can also contact us if you have questions or feedback. To contact us, please email us at: support@knowledgeadvances.org

Focco van den Akker, Ph.D., President and Co-founder, Knowledge Advances Inc.
Vivien Yee, Ph.D., Co-founder, Knowledge Advances Inc.

The Advance app and this website are under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Role of Generative AI in Enhancing Specific Aspects of the Advance App, Including Improving Question Wording

For transparency, we would like to disclose where generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) was used in developing the Advance app. First, generative AI was not used to develop the idea for this app nor the drafting of any of the quiz questions (> 500 questions); these aspects were all done by our Knowledge Advances Inc. team members. An initial version of the app, which was functional, was developed without the use of any AI tools.

However, generative AI was employed in the following areas:
-Editing to improve the wording of the quiz questions, answers, and explanations. The goal of this editing was to make the wording accessible to many readers by improving clarity, precision, and conciseness. AI was also used for editing other pages of the app.
-Double-checking the accuracy of quiz answers. As part of re-checking the correctness of all questions and answers, generative AI was additionally helpful as it generated an explanation for the correctness of the answer. These explanations on occasion did form the basis of the explanation provided after the user has answered a question, although many explanations were also drafted without help of AI. Note that not all questions needed an explanation.
-In a few instances, to generate a dummy answer suggestion for a multiple-choice question.
-To find an occasional resource for certain questions; the large majority of resources were, however, researched and found by the Knowledge Advance Inc. team.
-To format the question, answer options, explanation, answer key, and clickable resources of most questions into a suitable C++-compatible format for the app.
-To generate one line of code for overcoming an android-specific performance issue.
-Some lines of code to improve certain aspects of user experience such as formatting to italicize or bold specific words when displaying the quiz question or explanation.

The primary AI tool utilized was OpenAI's ChatGPT4, with occasional use of version 3.5. Other tools like Bing Chat and Google Bard were also employed, albeit infrequently.

Note that the final editing of all questions, answers, explanations, provided resources, and app pages was diligently performed by the Knowledge Advance Inc. team, aiming to ensure the highest quality and accuracy.