DOE · DOE-501 · record R3362

AskGDR

Department of Energy · NREL - National Renewable Energy Laboratory (EE)

Overview

Development stage: DeployedSource: c) Deployed – The use case is being actively authorized or utilized to support the functions or mission of an agency.
High-impact designation: Not high-impactSource: c) Not high-impact
Impact justification: Tool is designed as an AI research assistant to help users find answers to questions about specific datasets beyond simple keyword searches.
Start date: 2024-10-01 (day precision)Source: 2024-10-01T00:00:00
Withheld from public reporting: NoSource: a) No

Mission

Topic area: Energy and the Environment
Operational functions: Summarization, Search and knowledge retrieval Derived by keyword rules; see methodology

Problem the AI is intended to solve

AskGDR serves as a virtual research assistant to GDR users. It provides answers to a variety of user-provided questions using natural language processing and generative machine learning. Users can get answers to questions about specific datasets.

Expected benefits

Making data more accessible and user-friendly for the public.

System outputs

The systems leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation to find semantically relevent content which the AI (LLM) summarizes for the end user as a method to describe relevent content within the data catalog.

Technology

AI classification: Generative AISource: Generative AI: AI that generates new or synthetic content (e.g., images, videos, audio, text, code).
System name(s): NREL Stratus AWS Compute Environment
Custom-developed code: Yes
Public source code: Not reported

Sourcing

How it was built: Developed in-houseSource: b) Developed in-house
Vendor (as reported): AWS, Azure, OpenAI
Vendors (standardized): MicrosoftOpenAIAmazon Web Services

A vendor is the supplier named by the agency. It does not identify the underlying model or AI technology.

Data and privacy

Involves PII: No
Privacy Impact Assessment: Not reported
Authorization to Operate: Yes
Demographic features: Not reported
Training and evaluation data: As this is summarizing data from the GDR data repository the related datasets are described by the catalog which is also used to validate the AI responses: https://gdr.openei.org/
Federal Data Catalog: gdr.openei.org ↗

Governance

0 of 8 minimum-practice questions answered. A blank answer means the agency reported nothing; it does not mean the practice is absent.

Pre-deployment testingNo answer reported

AI impact assessmentNo answer reported

Independent reviewNo answer reported

Ongoing monitoringNo answer reported

Operator trainingNo answer reported

Fail-safeNo answer reported

Appeal processNo answer reported

User and public consultationNo answer reported

Potential impacts and how they were identified

Not reported