Nexus — Academic Document Assistant

Nexus is an AI-powered academic document assistant designed to help university students work more effectively with research documents, university requirements, guidelines, and templates. Problem: Students preparing theses, reports, and research projects often need to check multiple academic documents to understand required structures, formatting rules, methodology expectations, and project guidelines. Manually searching through many PDFs and documents is time-consuming and makes it easy to miss important requirements. Solution: Nexus allows students to upload their academic documents and ask questions about their content through a chatbot. The system processes the uploaded documents, extracts and prepares their content, retrieves the most relevant passages using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline, and passes the retrieved context to an AI agent powered by Gemini. The agent generates an answer grounded in the available documents and provides the relevant sources. Target Users: The primary users are university students working on theses, dissertations, reports, research projects, and other academic documents. The solution can also be useful for supervisors and academic teams working with institutional guidelines and templates. How Users Interact: A student uploads their documents through the web interface. Documents are processed and associated with the user's session. The student can then ask natural-language questions such as what structure is required, what sections are expected, or what a specific university document says. Nexus retrieves relevant information and returns a contextual answer with its sources. What Makes Nexus Unique: Instead of acting as a general chatbot, Nexus focuses on the student's own academic documents and university-provided resources. Its RAG architecture helps keep answers grounded in the uploaded content rather than relying only on general model knowledge. The combination of document retrieval, an AI agent, and source-based answers makes the interaction more useful for academic work. Technology: The frontend is built with React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS, React Router, and Axios. The backend uses Python, Django, and Django REST Framework with PostgreSQL. The AI layer uses Agent , LangChain, LangGraph, RAG, and Gemini. Nexus provides a practical way for students to turn complex collections of academic documents into an interactive and searchable knowledge assistant.