About Academic Lobster
Academic Lobster documents the journey of building an AI research assistant for social science research — powered by OpenClaw.
What is OpenClaw?
OpenClaw is an open-source platform that transforms AI from a passive text generator into an active, autonomous research assistant running on your machine. By granting the AI controlled access to your files, browser, computer, (email, cloud), it can independently execute multi-step background workflows such as scraping web data, formatting datasets, or running analysis scripts, based entirely on your high-level instructions.
Our Mission
Not everyone has the budget for a dedicated AI research assistant. We’re building one: open source, for social scientists, by social scientists. This blog documents every step: the setup, the models, the tweaks, the failures, and the wins. Everything is shared on GitHub.
It is also important to openly discuss AI capabilities and how it can and inevitably will transform academia.
Who We Are
This project is led by Levi Littvay and the Siliconometrics lab at ELTE Centre for Social Sciences.
Questions? Reach us HERE.