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Information World Review - September, 2008
Press Release - August 1, 2008
Press Release - June 3, 2008
Press Release - August 1, 2008
Elsevier Announces Ten Semi-finalists for the Elsevier Grand Challenge
Semi-finalists to work with 500,000+ articles to create the life sciences tools of the future
Amsterdam, August 1, 2008 Elsevier, a leading global healthcare and scientific publisher, has announced ten semi-finalists in The Elsevier Grand Challenge, a competition inviting the scientific community to prototype tools innovating how Life Sciences information is used in online text databases. The ten semifinalists were chosen by a distinguished panel of judges from among over 70 excellent entries offering a range of approaches involving semantics, visualization, protocols, social networks, and citations. The semifinalists include:
- Sean O'Donoghue and Lars Jensen, Germany, for “Reflect: Automated Annotation of Scientific Terms”
- Timothy Baldwin, Lawrence Cavedon, Sarvnaz Karimi, David Martinez, David Newman, Falk Scholer and Justin Zobel, Australia and US, “Effective Search, Classification, and Visualisation of Information from Large Collections of Biomedical Literature”
- Vit Novacek, Siegfried Handschuh and Tudor Groza, Ireland, “Teaching Machines to Teach Us: A Truly Knowledge-Based Publication Management”
- Amr Ahmed, Andrew Arnold, Luis Pedro Coelho, Saboor Sheikh, Eric Xing, William Cohen and Robert F. Murphy, US, “Information Retrieval and Topic Discovery using both Figures and Captions in Biological Literature”
- Stephen Wan, Robert Dale and Cecile Paris, Australia, “In-Context Summaries of Cited Documents: A Research Prototype for Academic and Scholarly Literature”
- Roderic Page, UK, “Towards realising Darwin’s dream: setting the trees free”
- Jose Gonzalez-Brenes, Aabid Shariff, Sourish Chaudhuri and Carolyn Rose, US, “Automating the Generation of Life Science Protocols”
- Glenn Ford, Sameer Antani, Dina Demner Fushman and George Thoma, US, “Tools to build and use Interactive Publications”
- Michael Greenacre and Trevor Hastie, Spain and US, “Guided Tours in N-Dimensional Space: Dynamic Visualization of Multivariate Data”
- Alexander Garcia and Alberto Labarga, Germany and Spain, “A tale of two cities in the land of serendipity: The semantic web and the social web heading towards a living document in life sciences.”
“We’re confident that we’ve gathered an exciting crop of projects,” remarked David Shotton, Image Bioinformatics Research Group, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford and Elsevier Challenge Judge, “Some of these very creative ideas will undoubtedly enable scientists to explore, visualize and expose the meaning contained within biological journal articles more thoroughly and effectively, providing better accessibility to the underlying data contained within research papers. This Grand Challenge will give semantic publishing a kick start, to the benefit of everyone's research experience.”
Emilie Marcus, Editor-in-Chief, Cell, Cambridge MA, noted, "As one of the judges, I was thrilled and inspired to see such a diverse and creative range of proposals for how to make the daily work of scientists easier and more productive. We await the semi-finalists' presentations in December with bated breath!”
“The semi-finalists will be given access to more than half a million life science articles, including their images and supplementary files in order to build their tool,” said Noelle Gracy, Genetics and Cell Biology Publisher and Grand Challenge organizer. “Access to such a large and diverse body of work will give them the opportunity to scale up their ideas and really test them to see if they can make something that will really change the way life scientists read, write, visualize--even think about--data.”
Elsevier Grand Challenge Finalists will be announced at the end of the year will be invited to present vision papers to the judging panel and the public in February 2009. The first place winner will receive a cash prize of $35,000 and the runner up will be awarded a $15,000 prize. As an additional benefit, finalists will enjoy free access to ScienceDirect and Scopus. Furthermore, contestants may be offered the opportunity to develop their tools in collaboration with Elsevier.
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About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier’s 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com/), MD Consult (http://www.mdconsult.com/), Scopus (http://www.info.scopus.com/), bibliographic databases, and online reference works.
Elsevier (http://www.elsevier.com/) is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc (http://www.reedelsevier.com/), a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier's ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).
Notes to Editors:
For more information about the awards, visit www.elseviergrandchallenge.com
Press Release - June 3, 2008
Elsevier Launches Competition for the Scientific Community in Knowledge Enchancement in the Life Sciences
Amsterdam, June 3, 2008 - Elsevier, a leading global healthcare and scientific publisher, announced today that it has launched a new competition inviting the scientific community to prototype tools to innovate how Life Sciences information is used in online text databases. “ The Elsevier Grand Challenge: Knowledge Enhancement in the Life Sciences” is designed to generate useful new ideas that will contribute to improving the productivity of life science researchers.
The deadline for submitting abstracts for The Elsevier Grand Challenge is July 15th. Winning ideas will improve the process of creating, reviewing and editing scientific content; interpreting or connecting the knowledge more effectively, or measuring the impact of these improvements. Semi-finalists will be chosen in the first week of August by a distinguished interdisciplinary panel of judges and given the opportunity to work with a large collection of Elsevier life science content to further develop and refine their concepts.
Finalists will be announced at the end of the year after a second round of judging and invited to present vision papers to the judging panel and the public in February 2009. The first place winner will be awarded a cash prize of $35,000 while the second place innovator will receive a $15,000 prize. As an additional benefit, finalists will enjoy free access to ScienceDirect and Scopus; moreover, all contestants may be offered the opportunity to develop their tools in collaboration with Elsevier.
"The Grand Challenge provides an innovative way to spur discussion on evolving text-centred modes of research. I'm excited to serve as a panel judge, and to experience the creativity of groups interested in changing the way in which science is published" remarked Eduard Hovy, Chair Panel of Judges and Director of the Natural Language Group, Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
“The Grand Challenge is about enabling scientists to interpret research more efficiently and effectively by recognizing relationships and patterns more rapidly than is currently possible. Eventually, we hope to accelerate the course of science”, says Bernard Aleva, Elsevier’s Global Director of Publishing, Life Sciences, “One of the best aspects of the Elsevier Grand Challenge is the chance to collaborate very closely with the scientific community to move a little bit closer to this goal.”
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Notes to Editors:
For more information about the awards, visit www.elseviergrandchallenge.com
About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier’s 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as ScienceDirect, MD Consult, Scopus, bibliographic databases, and online reference works.
Elsevier is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc, a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier's ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).
Media Contact:
Noelle Gracy
Elsevier
+31 20 485 3029
n.gracy@elsevier.com
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