Research catalogue application wins prize

BANGALORE: An application, which displays the names of authors with their latest and most-cited articles in a tabular format via a feed and helps researchers stay up to date on their disciplines, won a prize at app development contest here on Sunday.
Developed by Pinaki Dey, Sudipta Sadhu and Rajiv Ram from IIT-Bombay, IntelliScholar can also be used to retrieve information about gene or protein from databases such as National Centre for Biotechnology Information.
Over 100 teams submitted application concepts in the first round of the competition. Thirteen concepts were selected by a panel of professors and experts from National Innovation Council, Indian Institute of Science, Indian Institute of Technology–Bombay , Johns Hopkins University, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Madurai Kamraj University, Institute of Microbial Technology, Standard Life Sciences and NVIDIA.
In the 2nd round, participants had to develop applications in six weeks. “The competition brought fresh ideas to promote the use and integration of scientific data and literature. The concept and application coding are highly pertinent to our students and demonstrate the power of customized information retrieval concepts far beyond what is currently available among advanced search technologies ,” said Debnath Pal, Associate Professor, Indian Institute of Science.
ReachPathways — an application that searches ScienceDirect (a leading source of scientific research texts) full text articles and retrieves protein mentions in the article – created by Babylakshmi M, Harsha Gowda and Joji Kurian Thomas from the Institute of Bioinformatics, bagged the second prize.
DISQUS Science, an app developed by Rishi Das Roy of Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, which lets users comment on article and view other comments and reply won the third prize.
“Good apps are those that help people save time. The concepts submitted at CodeFor-Science were excellent. While some apps could cater to a huge number of people, others catered to a narrow range. For an application to be successful it should be simple and easy to use. Most young researchers, who submitted their app ideas, had given great thoughts to what problems to solve,” said Y S Chi, a renowned researcher and chairman of Elsevier, the organizers of the competition.