Milestone 3: Initial README Draft + Images Folder Setup

README.md

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+# 🌱 ELO2 – GREEN AI  
+
+***Comparing Commercial and Open-Source Language Models for***
+***Sustainable AI***
+
+This repository presents the **ELO2 – GREEN AI Project**, developed
+within the **MIT Emerging Talent – AI & ML Program (2025)**. The work
+investigates the technical performance, sustainability traits, and
+human-perceived quality of **open-source language models**
+compared to commercial systems.
+
+---
+
+## 🔍 Project Overview
+
+### Research Question
+
+**To what extent can open-source LLMs provide competitive output quality
+while operating at significantly lower environmental cost?**
+
+![image](readme_images/trade-off.png)
+
+### Motivation
+
+Large commercial LLMs deliver strong performance but demand substantial
+compute and energy. This project examines whether **small, accessible,
+and environmentally efficient open-source models**—especially when
+enhanced with retrieval and refinement pipelines—can offer practical
+alternatives for everyday tasks.
+
+---
+
+## 🧪 Methods
+
+![image](readme_images/project-timeline.png)
+
+### 1. Model Families
+
+The study evaluates several open-source model groups:
+
+- **Quantized Model:** Mistral-7B (GGUF)
+- **Distilled Model:** LaMini-Flan-T5-248M
+- **Small Models:** Qwen, Gemma
+- **Enhanced Pipelines (applied to all model families):**
+  - **RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)**
+  - **Recursive Editing**
+    - includes AI-based critique and iterative refinement
+
+These configurations serve as the optimized open-source setups used in
+the comparison against commercial models.
+
+### 2. Tasks & Dataset
+
+Evaluation tasks include:
+
+- summarization
+- factual reasoning
+- paraphrasing
+- short creative writing
+- instruction following
+- question answering
+
+A targeted excerpt from the **Apollo-11 mission transcripts** served as
+the central reference text for all evaluation tasks. All prompts were constructed
+directly from this shared material. Using a single, consistent source ensured
+that every model was tested under identical informational conditions, allowing
+clear and fair comparison of output quality and relevance.
+
+### 3. RAG Pipeline
+
+Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) was applied to multiple model
+families. The pipeline includes:
+
+- document indexing  
+- dense similarity retrieval  
+- context injection through prompt augmentation  
+- answer synthesis using guidance prompts  
+
+RAG improved factual grounding in nearly all models.
+
+### 4. Recursive Editing Framework
+
+A lightweight iterative refinement procedure was implemented:
+
+1. **Draft Generation:**  
+   The primary model produces an initial output.
+
+2. **AI-Based Critique:**  
+   A secondary SLM evaluates clarity, accuracy, faithfulness and relevance.
+
+3. **Refinement Step:**  
+   A revision prompt integrates critique and generates an improved text.
+
+4. **Stopping Condition:**  
+   The cycle ends after a fixed number of iterations or when critique
+   stabilizes.
+
+This approach allowed weaker SLMs to yield higher-quality results
+without relying on large models.
+
+### 5. Environmental Measurement
+
+Environmental footprint data was captured with **CodeCarbon**, recording:
+
+- CPU/GPU energy usage
+- Carbon emissions
+- PUE-adjusted overhead
+
+These measurements enabled comparison with published metrics for
+commercial LLMs.
+
+### 6. Human Evaluation (Single-Blind)
+
+A structured Google Form experiment collected:
+
+- **source identification** (commercial vs. open-source)  
+- **quality ratings** on accuracy, faithfulness, relevance, and clarity  
+  (1–5 scale)
+
+Outputs were randomized and anonymized to avoid bias. This provided a
+perception-based counterpart to technical evaluation.
+
+### 7. Analysing the Results
+
+....
+
+### 8. Publishing an Article
+
+....
+
+---
+
+## 📊 Key Findings
+
+- FINDING1.....
+- FINDING2.....
+- FINDING3.....
+- FINDING4.....
+
+---
+
+## 🔮 Future Work
+
+- Evaluate additional open-source model families across diverse tasks
+- Test optimized pipelines in specialized domains (medical, legal, technical writing)
+- Track carbon footprint across full lifecycle (training to deployment)
+- Conduct ablation studies isolating RAG vs. recursive editing contributions
+
+---
+
+## 📢 Communication Strategy
+
+The research findings will be shared through formats designed for different
+audiences and purposes:
+
+### For Researchers
+
+A comprehensive research article will document the complete experimental design,
+statistical analysis, and implications.
+
+🔗 **[View Aticle](link1)**
+
+### For Practitioners & Educators
+
+An executive presentation provides a visual overview of the research question,
+methodology, and key findings without requiring deep technical background.
+
+🔗 **[View Presentation](link2)**
+
+### For the Community
+
+A public evaluation study invites participation in assessing AI-generated texts.
+This crowdsourced data forms a critical component of the research.
+
+🔗 **[Participate in Study](link3)**
+
+### For Reproducibility
+
+All materials (dataset, prompts, model outputs, evaluation scripts, and carbon
+tracking logs) are publicly available in this repository.
+
+🔗 **[Browse Repository](https://github.com/banuozyilmaz2-jpg/ELO2-GREEN-AI)**
+
+---
+
+## 👥 Contributors
+
+- [Amro Mohamed](https://github.com/Elshikh-Amro)
+- [Aseel Omer](https://github.com/AseelOmer)
+- [Banu Ozyilmaz](https://github.com/doctorbanu)
+- [Caesar Ghazi](https://github.com/CaesarGhazi)
+- [Reem Osama](https://github.com/reunicorn1)
+- [Safia Gibril Nouman](https://github.com/Safi222)
+
+---
+
+## 🙏 Acknowledgments
+
+Special thanks to the **MIT Emerging Talent Program** for their guidance and
+feedback throughout the project.