Policy in areas such as conservation, energy, healthcare, and sustainable development is informed by a variety of factors, including the best available science. Determining the best available science requires synthesizing multiple scientific results to gauge both the level of scientific consensus and the reliability of the research. However, on some policy-relevant topics, syntheses continue…

The scientific challenge for this project is to accelerate discovery and exploration of the synthetic biology design space. In particular, many parts used in synthetic biology come from or are initially tested in a simple bacteria, E. coli, but many potential applications in energy, agriculture, materials, and health require either different bacteria or higher level organisms (yeast for…

Biased citation benefits authors in the short-term by bolstering grants and papers, making them more easily accepted. However, it can have severe negative consequences for scientific inquiry. The need for a bias detection tool is evident from previous studies on citation bias, but existing work lacks crucial elements needed to scale the underlying approaches. This project will test the…

Notably absent in the current rush to digitize newspapers and books are critical investigations of the processes and products of this work. Such examinations are forestalled, Bonnie Mak argues, by a rhetoric of revolution that determines how the phenomenon should be constituted and studied, just as it continues to do for the so-called printing revolution of the fifteenth century. Her analysis…

iSchool faculty members Catherine Blake and Michael Twidale are working as expert advisors to the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Information Resource Center (VIReC) on a project to analyze the socio-technical aspects of VA’s HSRData-L Listserv. VIReC is a VA Health Service Research & Development Service (HSR&D) resource center that supports VA researchers in need of information…

The U.S. scientific workforce is aging - the average age of both US academics and medical school faculty increased to the late 40s, from the early 40s in 1970. This aging is troubling because people are seen to make important scientific contributions early in their careers. Moreover, the U.S. is turning to innovation as an economic driver, and the aging of the population will both increase and…

In order for older texts to be searchable, contemporary English needs to be translated into language from various historical timeframes. The project will develop software that will let people enter a query in contemporary English, and search over English texts throughout history—from Medieval times to the present day. The project will mostly involve training statistical models that assign…

Microblogging services like Twitter are becoming an important part of how many people manage information in their day to day activities. As microblog traffic increases (Twitter currently sees about 50 million tweets per day) information management and organization will become keen problems in this area. The project will define the core problems in microblog search and propose solutions to…

Taxonomists are scientists who describe the world’s biodiversity. These descriptions of millions of species allow scientists to do many different kinds of research, including basic biology, environmental science, climate research, agriculture, and medicine. The problem is that describing any one species is not easy. The language used by taxonomists to describe their data is complex, and…

This project arises from longstanding recognition of the challenges associated with the documentation of, and access to, collections of performance ephemera, for which the British Library is a key repository in the UK. Live musical events play a vital role in community life across the globe, yet they often leave only faint traces on the historical record, even in modern times. Sources can be…