Scientific software ideas wanted – 10 tips to impress the catalyst grant panel

Whether it’s complying with funder mandates, collaborating with colleagues abroad, or trying to discover the right articles, the list of problems facing researchers is ever-growing. Fortunately, there are an increasing number of software tools and technologies to solve these problems, allowing researchers to spend more of their time on what they really care about—their research! Many of these tools have sprung from the minds of frustrated academics who identify the need for a solution to a problem, then go ahead and build it themselves. To support researchers to develop these ideas, Digital Science offers Catalyst Grants of up to £15,000 ($25,000), with the aim of supporting original, early-stage software ideas that further scientific research. Michael Schmidt, a former researcher at Cornell University, was awarded one of our Catalyst Grants for his idea to develop a ‘robotic scientist’ to 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 with the ‘Data Genome Project’. The goal: to collect one million datasets, analyze them in the cloud, find out what hidden equations lie in them and link them all together. According to Schmidt, we often take the massive complexity in the world for granted. The sheer scale of a project like Nutonian needed support from other quarters to bring it to fruition. “The Catalyst Grant Program has been instrumental,” he says. “We ...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Tags: Publishing Digital Science Source Type: blogs