The CSF Talks and Awards ceremony was the culmination of an application development challenge series wherein participants developed apps for science over a course of six weeks from May 5th to 28th July. The event was started last year by Elsevier as an open forum to develop tools and approaches that will aid researchers in scientific discovery and impact changes in the scientific research workflow. It is organized as a competition that encourages participants to come up with ideas and develop innovative solutions to enhance the search and discovery experience of users of Elsevier’s Science Direct, a leading resource of scientific articles and SciVerse Scopus, a database of peer-reviewed literature.
The second prize in the event was bagged by an application developed by BabyLakshmi Muthusamy, Harsha Gowda and Joji Kurian Thomas, from Institute of Bioinformatics, called “ReachPathways” that searches Science Direct full text articles and retrieves protein mentions in the article. Two awards in excellence category were won by Srinivas M. Srikanth and Joji Kurian Thomas for developing applications, LitMuS for Literature Mutation Search and NetSlim respectively. Apart from this, BabyLakshmi and Joji Kurian Thomas also won 2 awards in the Concept Formulation round. By actively participating and providing key support to the event, IOB reiterated its commitment to providing targeted and efficient solutions to problems faced by researchers today to help accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.
A panel discussion by eminent scientists on ‘Science Your Way – Role of customized workflow solutions’ was conducted by Dr. Akhilesh Pandey, Founder and Director, IOB and was presided by Dr. Debnath Pal, Associate Professor at IISc, Dr. Ramesh Hariharan, Co-founder and CEO, Strand Life Sciences, Dr. Sanjeeva Srivastava, Assistant Professor, IIT, Bombay, Dr. Gajendra P.S. Raghava, Head of Bioinformatics Center, Institute of Microbial Technology and Dr. Debasis Dash, Scientist, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology.