UniVERSO is an AI-powered research discovery tool built by the University of Idaho Library and the Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Sciences (IIDS). It lets anyone — students, faculty, staff, community partners, or the public — search for U of I researchers and expertise using plain-language questions instead of exact keywords, and it draws its answers from VERSO profile and publication data.
UniVERSO is currently in beta. Data is still being ingested, ranking is still being tuned, and AI-generated answers may contain mistakes — always verify anything important against a researcher’s VERSO profile or by contacting them directly.
What You Can Use It For
Finding a collaborator or co-investigator. Describe a research problem or methodology in your own words and see which faculty members’ published work relates to it — including connections across departments that a keyword search might miss.
Finding an advisor or mentor. Prospective and current graduate students can search by topic to identify faculty whose research and student mentorship history align with their interests.
Scoping expertise for a grant, media inquiry, or partnership. Quickly identify who at the university works in a given area, along with representative publications, without needing to know the exact terminology a department uses internally.
Exploring a department or unit’s research footprint. Ask about a specific college, department, or program to see the researchers and work associated with it.
General research exploration. Because UniVERSO uses conceptual (semantic) search rather than strict keyword matching, it can surface related work in adjacent fields — for example, a query about “machine learning in agriculture” may also return researchers working on “precision farming” or “crop yield prediction.”
UniVERSO only knows about researchers and publications that exist in VERSO. If someone doesn’t have a VERSO profile, or their VERSO profile is sparse, they are less likely to be discoverable — see Improving Your Results below.
How UniVERSO Works
UniVERSO does not maintain its own research records — it is a search and summarization layer built entirely on top of VERSO data, pulling profiles and publications in, embedding them for conceptual search, matching them against your query, and generating a response with AI (via MindRouter). This also covers how the per-researcher AI summaries are generated. See How UniVERSO Works for the full technical walkthrough.
Improving Your Results
UniVERSO’s ability to find and correctly represent you depends entirely on the richness of your VERSO profile. To improve how discoverable and accurately represented you are:
Add keywords to your VERSO profile. Include both broad terms (e.g., “environmental science”) and specific ones (e.g., “soil carbon sequestration”). Keywords directly inform both search matching and the AI summary.
Link your publications and creative works, and make sure the association is correct — the more of your work that’s connected to your profile, the more accurately UniVERSO can represent your expertise.
Add abstracts to your publications. Abstracts give the embedding and summarization steps far more to work with than a bare title.
Write a bio and list research interests. These fields feed directly into your AI-generated summary.
Connect your ORCID so your publications are reliably attributed to you rather than left unlinked.
Keep your profile current. UniVERSO’s picture of your work is only as recent as your VERSO profile and UniVERSO’s last data refresh.
Your AI-generated summary is separate from your VERSO profile itself — it’s a derived, algorithmically written overview that UniVERSO displays and searches on your behalf. You have a few options for controlling it:
Request a revision. If your summary is inaccurate, outdated, or doesn’t reflect your work the way you’d like, contact us with what should change. We can manually edit it or regenerate it once your underlying VERSO profile is updated.
Provide your own summary. Rather than relying on the automatically generated version, you can supply your own text to be shown in its place.
Opt out of AI summarization entirely. If you’d prefer that no AI-generated summary be produced for you at all, let us know and we will exclude you from future summary generation. Your other VERSO-derived information (profile, keywords, and publications) can still be found in UniVERSO’s search results — only the automatically generated narrative summary is removed.
This is distinct from VERSO’s own visibility controls. Hiding a work or field directly in VERSO (see the Privacy section of Editing Your Profile) removes it from both VERSO and UniVERSO. Opting out of an AI summary only affects the AI-written overview — it does not hide your profile or publications from UniVERSO search, and it does not change anything in VERSO itself.
Good to Know
UniVERSO is in beta. Answers and summaries are AI-generated and may contain mistakes; data ingestion and ranking are still being refined.
Coverage is limited to VERSO. If a researcher or publication doesn’t appear, it may not yet be represented in VERSO.
Match scores are query-specific. The relevance percentage shown for a result reflects how closely it matches your particular question — the same publication can score differently for a different query.
Data isn’t live. UniVERSO refreshes from VERSO on a regular schedule rather than syncing instantly, so very recent VERSO changes may take some time to appear.