‘IntelliScholar’, A Marvel By IITians wins Elsevier’s CodeForScience Competition

In a world driven by technology and science, everyday is a new discovery and every minute is a new invention. The young generation is gearing up for a matrix laden future by exploring and adding a new edge to the world of science and technology. Making the world go beyond its dimension, IITians from Mumbai brought laurels to their institute by participating in the “CodeForScience” competition.

CodeForScience Competition is a global series of application development competitions for scientists, researcher and developers, this time held in India. This event aims at encouraging young ones to create customized innovative solutions to enhance the search and discovery experience for users of ScienceDirect and Scopus. The event was held by Elsevier Science and Technology, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services while it was co-sponsored by global technology companies, NVIDIA, Thermo Scientific, and Microsoft Research, along with key support from members of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Institute of Bioinformatics (IOB).

The participants from IIT Bombay created an application ‘Intellischolar’ which won them the grand prize. This was announced by Elsevier on July 29, 2012. The winning application will be made available in the Applications Marketplace in the coming days.

The participants worked in teams to submit application concepts during the first round of the competition. Three winning concepts and ten creative concepts receiving honorable mention were selected from more than 100+ entries following an evaluation by a judging panel. During the second round, participants developed applications over a course of six weeks. In addition to the content provided via Elsevier’s Application Programming Interface (API), teams were free to use a variety of resources including Microsoft Academic Search API.

The winning applications were selected based on the evaluation and scoring by the judging panel including professors and information management experts from National Innovation Council, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IITB), Johns Hopkins University (JHU), Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), Madurai Kamaraj University, Institute of Microbial Technology, Strand Life Sciences and NVIDIA.

Talking about the need for more research in the field of Science, Debnath Pal, Associate Professor, Indian Institute of Science said, "In this era of fast information delivery and high throughout science, researchers need tools to help them to keep pace. Elsevier's ScienceDirect and Scopus research platforms and CodeForScience are geared to address this need.” “CFS India brings fresh ideas to promote the use and integration of scientific data and literature. The concepts and application coding are highly pertinent to our students and demonstrate the power of customized information retrieval concepts far beyond what is currently available among advanced search technologies,” he added.

Providing researchers a platform to explore, Y S Chi, chairman of Elsevier Management Committee, stressed, “At Elsevier, our goal is to enable researchers to do what they do best: make new discoveries. To help them do this, we strive to deliver the right information to them at the right time in the right context.”


The winning teams and their applications are:
 

• Grand Prize: Pinaki Dey, Sudipta Sadhu and Rajiv Ram from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, for development of “IntelliScholar”: an application that shows the names of authors with their latest and most-cited articles in tabular format via a feed that helps researchers stay up to date on their research disciplines. The feed shows all references of the current article based on publication date. The potential of IntelliScholar is apparent on pages related to life science. Users can search or select gene or protein terms to open a message window, which will present information as retrieved from databases such as National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in a graph.

• Second Prize: Babylakshmi M., Harsha Gowda and Joji Kurian Thomas from Institute of Bioinformatics, for development of “ReachPathways”: an application that searches ScienceDirect full text articles and retrieves protein mentions in the article. Clicking on a particular protein leads to a view of the protein in various pathways fetched from the popular pathway resources. Pathway resources include NetPath, Reactome, WikiPathways, STKE and NCI-PID.

• Third Prize: Rishi Das Roy, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, for development of “DISQUS Science”: an application that lets users comment on an article, view other comments and reply back. Users can also share articles, comments and rate the articles and comments. At the same time users can subscribe to particular discussion-threads to remain updated.