Watch the recording of the event here.
The COVID Information Commons (CIC) as an open resource for researchers, students and decision-makers from academia, government, not-for-profits and industry to identify collaboration opportunities, to leverage each other’s research findings, and to accelerate the most promising research to mitigate the broad societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The CIC provides multiple search mechanisms to access customized views of the NSF COVID awards database. Contextual and keyword searches provide researchers and students the opportunity to identify research relevant to their work and potential collaborators. The COVID Research Explorer Machine Learning tool clusters awards in topographical and polygonal tree maps with keyword labels. Each NSF award represented has a drill-down capability to identify the award number, institution, Principal Investigator (PI) name and email, state, award amount, abstract, and other available information.
The CIC was developed in partnership with the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub at Columbia University, the Columbia University Libraries team and IT team, in collaboration with the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub, South Big Data Innovation Hub, and West Big Data Innovation Hub. This is an excellent example of collaboration between IT, data science, researchers, and librarians to bring the best of research and collaboration opportunities to the broad research and education communities to positively impact society in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The processes we used to design and develop the COVID Information Commons, the outreach we did to the COVID-19 research community to gain additional insight and information to enrich the NSF Award dataset, the mechanisms for information retrieval and data representation, and the resulting open website and collaborative community will be presented along with a demonstration of the COVID Information Commons.
Presenters:
Florence Hudson
Executive Director, Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub
Columbia University
Jeremiah Trinidad-Christensen
Head, Research Data Services
Columbia University
Nora Garza
Laredo College
Sarah Bowman
University of Buffalo