Bob the SAGE – AI Research Copilot

Bob the SAGE (Systematic Academic Guidance Engine) is an AI‑assisted research copilot that helps developers and researchers turn messy academic queries into structured insight. Given a topic like “CRISPR gene therapy”, it fetches real papers, builds a citation graph with PageRank to surface key work, constructs a timeline to highlight paradigm shifts, and then summarizes everything as a literature review and draft research proposal. Under the hood, SAGE is a full web app with a FastAPI backend and modern frontend. The citation graph and timeline engines have been hardened to handle noisy data, disconnected components, and edge cases, and the backend is covered by dozens of tests with 80%+ coverage. We used IBM Bob throughout the lifecycle: to review and improve the core algorithms, define five reusable Bob Skills (extraction, synthesis, graph analysis, translation, proposal), generate tests, produce a 600+ line security audit, and write architecture and API documentation. The app shows a clear pipeline from query to results and exposes controls for year range, language, and max papers, with sensible defaults and ethical API usage: no keys in the repo, pluggable data sources, and explicit respect for provider terms. For judges, Bob the SAGE is both a working demo you can run locally and a concrete example of how IBM Bob can accelerate building production‑style developer tools for research and education.