AquiLLM
AquiLLM (pronounced ah-quill-em) is a tool that helps researchers manage, search, and interact with their research materials both private and public. The goal is to enable teams to access and preserve their collective knowledge, and to enable new group members to get up to speed quickly.
About AquiLLM
- Research groups struggle to capture and retrieve knowledge distributed across team members.
- Much of this knowledge is informal—emails, notes, and conversations—and remains fragmented or undocumented.
- This constitutes tacit knowledge: experience-based expertise central to research practice.
- Accessing it is time-consuming and requires contextual familiarity.
- RAG systems enable querying over document collections, but are typically designed for public data.
- Existing systems often do not address the privacy of internal research materials.
- AquiLLM is an open-source, modular RAG system designed for research groups.
- It supports diverse data types and configurable privacy for both formal and informal knowledge.
Designed for Open-Weight Models and Local Systems
Supports local deployment using open-weight models, avoiding dependence on external APIs. This allows research groups to control data, model selection, and inference within their own computing environments.
Technical Details
Architecture: Coming soon, our new refactor, available in Github!For more details about the implementations and initial findings, see our research paper: "AquiLLM: a RAG Tool for Capturing Tacit Knowledge in Research Groups" by Chandler Campbell, Bernie Boscoe, and Tuan Do presented at USRSE 2025.
Contributors and Collaborators
Principal Investigators
- Prof. Bernie Boscoe (Southern Oregon University)
- Prof. Tuan Do (UCLA)
Developers
- Chandler Campbell
- Jack Stark
Contributors
- Amy Cheatle (Cornell University)
- Zhuo Chen (University of Washington)
- Andrew Lizzarga (UCLA)
- Jonathan Soriano (UCLA)
- Morgan Himes (UCLA)
- Srinath Saikrishnan (UCLA)
- Jacob Nowack (Southern Oregon University)
- Jackson Godsey (Southern Oregon University)
- Tee Grant (Southern Oregon University)
Former Contributors
- Skyler Acosta (Southern Oregon University)
- Kevin Donlon (Southern Oregon University)
- Elyjah Kiehne (Southern Oregon University)
About the Name
AquiLLM is a combination of the words "Aquila," the constellation, and "LLM," which stands for Large Language Model. Aquila is one of the most prominent constellations in the northern sky. The name reflects our group's history in working with Astronomy and Astronomers.
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
National Science Foundation