Sloan: ResearchBit: Profiling Researcher Interests through Professional Society Meetings and Conferences
As we shift to digitally-mediated scholarship, we need innovative methods for scholarly communication. Formal methods for scholarly communication are undergoing vast transformation owing to the open-access movement and reproducible research. However, informal scholarly communication that takes place at professional society meetings and conferences has received limited research attention relying primarily on serendipitous interaction. With the support of the Sloan Foundation, this project aims to improve informal methods of scholarly communication by leveraging serendipitous interaction taking place at meetings and conferences to inform researchers how they can self-organize themselves, making them more aware of co-located people with mutual interests. A specific goal is to inform network connections by tracking research interests at professional society meetings using RFID data, and recommending other co-located people of potential interest. We are using Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) meetings, which are held over a period of 3-4 days in parallel sessions, as a testbed to track and make network recommendations.
NSF EarthCube: Enterprise Architecture for Transformative Research and Collaboration Across the Geosciences
This project seeks to integrate traditional information system components developed in various branches of the geosciences with a number of emerging technologies that support scholarly communication, self-organization, and social networking in order to create an enterprise architecture within EarthCube. EarthCube is conceptualized as an evolving, community-governed cyberinfrastructure supporting geoscience research and education enterprise. In this project the EarthCube enterprise is conceptualized from five distinct perspectives: as an open federation of systems, as an environment for scholarly communication, as an environment for cross-domain information integration, as a system to enable efficient execution of research workflows, and as an environment for alignment of stakeholder interests.
NSF: Incentives for researcher profile maintenance and access, and their value in science and innovation
The motivation of this project is to determine if accurate and up-to-date information on researcher expertise, qualifications, and interests may foster new forms of social capital that can increase scientific innovation and collaboration. To test this hypothesis, we hav developing, analyzing, and evaluating methods that augment incentives for active profile maintenance. When automatically combined with existing information (e.g., demographic, biographic) and new data (e.g., patents, grants) that are widely available, these methods may provide considerable potential value to current profiling systems. As part of this project we have developed
faceted browser techniques.
