Meet team 2: NICTA BioTALA

NICTA BioTALA (minus Scholer and Newman)

Team members:
Timothy Baldwin - University of Melbourne, Australia
Lawrence Cavedon (project leader) - NICTA and RMIT University, Australia
Sarvnaz Karimi - NICTA, Australia
David Martinez - University of Melbourne, Australia
David Newman - University of California, Irvine, United States
Falk Scholer - NICTA, Australia
Justin Zobel - University of Melbourne, Australia

Project Title: Effective Search, Classification, and Visualisation of Information from Large Collections of Biomedical Literature

Website: http://nicta.com.au/research/projects/BioTALA

INTERVIEW WITH TEAM 2

>> Academic background of team members
We are a project team with members from NICTA (National ICT Australia)---Australia's centre of excellence in ICT research---the University of Melbourne, and the University of California at Irvine.
The team has academic research backgrounds in information retrieval, human language technology, and text mining. Information on the team, including links to team member individual pages, can be found at: http://nicta.com.au/research/projects/BioTALA

>> Current research interests related to Elsevier Grand Challenge
We are developing "text mining" technologies to (semi-)automatically discover and visualise information from genetic and other biomedical research and clinical documents. Drawing on the team's leading strengths in information retrieval and natural lanuage processing, we aim to develop and apply text mining techniques to a variety of practical problems faced by biomedical researchers.

>> Why were you inspired to enter the Grand Challenge?
Our aim is to provide tools of use to biomedical researchers in extracting and visualising information, and testing our techniques on large full-text document collections is a crucial test for us.

>> What do you see as the greatest challenge in finalizing your Grand Challenge?
Text mining biomedical literature is recognized as a highly challenging area. Refining our techniques into practical tools that can be used by the working scientist is definitely a challenge.

>> What would you do with the prize money?
We're not doing it for the money! :-)

>> Does your team have a name?
We are the NICTA BioTALA (BioMedical Text and Language Applications) project team.

Copyright © Elsevier 2008