Digital Science Catalyst Grant Awarded To NZ Startup Simiary

Digital Science Catalyst Grant Awarded To New Zealand Startup, Simiary

Grant offered to software company aiming to improve content discovery via intelligent search

Auckland, New Zealand Wednesday 7 th September 2016: Digital Science, a business division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and a leading global technology incubator focused on jumpstarting innovation in the research community, announced today that earlystage startup Simiary will be awarded a Catalyst Grant of up to $25,000.

The Catalyst Grant is an international initiative to support the innovation of new software tools and technologies for research. The program supports and invests in early stage ideas in the novel use of information technology in research, with an award of up to $25,000 for the most promising ideas to aid science and further education research.

Founded by Ben Adams and Richard Hosking whilst at the University of Auckland, Simiary is a software company that wants to improve scientific content discovery by offering intelligent exploratory search and analysis software.

The majority of scientific knowledge consists of unstructured data built for human consumption, in the form of publications, data abstracts, reports, grant submissions, blog posts, and even email mailing lists. Yet, the massive scale at which this data is generated limits what we can learn from it. The organization of scientific knowledge is stuck in the past. Finding and understanding relevant information from this boundless content is a big problem and current tools are not sophisticated enough.

Simiary’s unique software automatically ingests and resolves these diverse types of unstructured data and thematically contextualizes the related content. This allows their users to discover relevant information quicker, form connections, and make new insights. Research is increasingly cross disciplinary and the ability to discover and synthesize multiple sources of information is now critical for both researchers and policymakers alike. Simiary’s tools are designed to augment this exploratory nature of modern research.

Early examples of Simiary’s capabilities can be found at Frankenplace , an interactive thematic map search engine that uses geographic context as a means to discover, organise, and interactively visualise documents related to a search query.

The Catalyst Grant will be used to continue software development and to develop working relationships with early adopters, service owners, and enduser groups.

Ben Adams founder, Simiary says:

“We are thrilled to be awarded the Catalyst Grant from Digital Science, especially as the competition attracted lots of strong applicants. This additional support, which you don’t get from traditional funding sources, makes the Digital Science Catalyst Grant an ideal partner.”

Steve Scott, Director of Portfolio Development at Digital Science adds:

“Simiary is approaching search in a new and exciting way, giving researchers the ability to construct and search across domainspecific relationships within their subject areas. With their intelligent parsing of content, we believe their software will help garner unique insights into new and existing material, especially in an increasingly crossdisciplinary world.”

Simiary joins two other companies who have also been awarded Catalyst Grants.

The Digital Science Catalyst Grant

The Catalyst Grant is an international initiative to support the innovation of new software tools and technologies for research. The program aims to support and invest in early stage ideas in the novel use of information technology in research, with an award of up to $25,000 for the most promising ideas. To date more than $100,000 in grants has been awarded. The goal of the grant is to help entrepreneurs grow an idea from concept to prototype, working with Digital Science to refine, develop and promote their innovations to the wider scientific and technology communities.

Previous Grantees have included:

Alok Tayi, TetraScience
Building a cloudbased laboratory that can accelerate scientific discovery
TetraScience is a Boston-based technology company building an open InternetofThings (IoT) platform to enhance productivity, safety and reproducibility. By combining wifi connected tools and a cloudbased software platform, scientists can monitor and control their experiments from anywhere and upload the data directly to the cloud, thereby accelerating the research process. Alok, alongside a team of serial entrepreneurs from Harvard & MIT, founded the company and explains that the Catalyst Grant funding is enabling his team to pursue their vision of a cloudbased laboratory that can dramatically accelerate scientific discovery.

Suw CharmanAnderson, Ada Lovelace Day
An international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths.
Each year, Ada Lovelace Day (ALD) holds flagship science cabaret event in London, whilst around the world independent groups put on their own events. This year, Ada Lovelace Day Live! will be hosted by Conway Hall, the world’s oldest surviving freethought organisation, on 13 October. ALD is also aiming to encourage over 100 grassroots events across all seven continents.

James Harwood, Penelope
Improving the quality of scientific research reporting
Penelope, a London based technology company that wants to help publishers enhance the standard of scientific research reporting. They are building an automated editorial assistant that uses machine reading to check for common reporting errors and then gives instant feedback to authors, so editors can be certain that all received submissions meet the high standards set by journals, funders and academic bodies.

Michael Schmidt, Nutonian
Creating a Robotic Scientist to See Patterns in Massive Data Sets
According to Michael Schmidt, CEO at Nutonian, Inc. and a former researcher at Cornell University, we often take the massive complexity in the world for granted. That’s why Schmidt is working on a new direction in artificial intelligence – the creation of a “robotic scientist” that can identify patterns in massive data sets unseen to the human eye. He and his team at Nutonian have set out to map the world’s data sets, calling it the “data genome project”. The goal is to collect one million data sets in the first year, analyze them in the cloud, find out what hidden equations lie in them and link them together. This innovative process will reveal road markers that will allow scientists to look back and see what they say about science and data in general. Schmidt says that “the Catalyst Grant Program has been instrumental, and that we wouldn’t have been able to do the project without it”.

Reuben Robbins, Grantee
Transforming neurocognitive research through technology
Reuben Robbins, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, studies the neurocognitive aspects of HIV through research and neurological testing that requires extensive manual processing. Robbins realized that the interactive nature of the electronic touchscreen could reduce most of the manual processing and an online database could make test results available to his peers globally – transforming research in the field. The new platform affords clinicians instant results and eliminates manual processing to save time and ensure consistency. According to Robbins, funding typically comes through the federal government and is a slow process. “The Catalyst Grant is intellectual and emotional support with fast and flexible funding.”

Nathan Jenkins and Alberto Pepe, Authorea
Dynamic content and datadriven figures for scholarly papers
Nathan Jenkins and Alberto Pepe, of the University of Geneva and Harvard University respectively, cofounded Authorea to bring the modern capabilities of the Web to the previously staid world of scholarly publishing. The Web at some level has transformed most mediums, but the scholarly paper has remained a mostly static document, until now. Authorea allows researchers to dynamically present insights and collaborate on research data in realtime, and gives readers the ability to interact with source data directly. For the first time, scientists will be able to not only read a scholarly piece, but easily understand how the researchers came to their conclusions based on the data, and use it themselves in future studies.

Digital Science is a technology company serving the needs of scientific and research communities, at the laboratory bench or in a research setting. It invests in and incubates scientific software companies that simplify the research cycle, making more time for discovery. Its portfolio companies include a host of leading and admired brands including Altmetric, BioRAFT, Figshare, Labguru, Overleaf, ReadCube, GRID, Symplectic and ÜberResearch. It is operated by global media company, the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. Visit www.digitalscience. com and follow @digitalsci on Twitter.

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