IntelliScholar Wins Elsevier's India CodeForScience Competition

AMSTERDAM, July 30, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

Grand Prize goes to IntelliScholar, built by participants from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services, today announced the winners and winning applications of its second CodeForScience (CFS) Competition, a global series of application development competitions for scientists, researchers and developers, this time held in India. This competition encourages participants to create customized innovative solutions to enhance the search and discovery experience for users of ScienceDirect and Scopus.

"In this era of fast information delivery and high throughput 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," said Debnath Pal, Associate Professor, Indian Institute of Science.  "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."  

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.

"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," said Y.S. Chi, Chairman of Elsevier Management Committee. "We've consistently worked to develop a deep understanding of our customers and their needs, but initiatives like the CodeForScience competition enable the community to identify pain points and drive innovation themselves. This leads to more targeted and efficient solutions to the problems faced by researchers today."

Participants worked in teams to submit application concepts during 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 the 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.

CodeForScience India 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 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.

The winning application will be made available in the Applications Marketplace in the coming days.

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include ScienceDirect, Scopus, Reaxys, ClinicalKey and Mosby's Nursing Suite, which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite and MEDai's Pinpoint Review, which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.

A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC, a world-leading publisher and information provider, which is jointly owned by Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

Media contact

Catherine Gold
Elsevier
+1-212-462-1965
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