Use Cases for the Researcher Workspace

In the last blog post we introduced our new shiny tool – the Researcher Workspace. A place where you decide how to do your research process and apply the AI-based tools you need. In this post we want to introduce you to some concrete client use cases and explain how we set up their workspace for their unique process to address their needs. 

Food safety reviews

We are working with a niche review team that needed to perform a wide range of food safety related searches to keep the population safe. The team needed a better way to do full interdisciplinary literature searches on a broad variety of topics, expanding beyond their individual areas of expertise.  They have a simple Workspace with an Explore tool, where the reviewer can input a human language description of the research, without the need for comprehensive vocabulary understanding.  Iris.ai uses contextual key terms, synonyms and hypernyms to build a ‘fingerprint’ it can match to other papers and presents a visual map with overview over topics and relevant research papers. 

Exploratory R&D for a biotech Company

This collaboration is with a biotech company that has extensive R&D efforts in mapping out a knowledge graph of real world data (e.g any microorganism they locate in their field or lab work) that will lead to new insights for their product development. Their starting point is an entity (e.g bacteria, parasite) in a given context – and then search for all relevant knowledge, analyze all articles found, extract the key data points and summarize the findings, with the goal of connecting information in a database. 

Pharmacovigilance for a Contract Research Organization

This CRO performs regular contract work where they do limited, specific and rapid literature searches for their clients across a variety of medical devices and drugs. 

They are regularly undertaking post market surveillance and pharmacovigilance studies. Usually each project is about 80 hours. In order to reduce the time the team spends on the manual work, the CRO has an Iris.ai Researcher Workspace setup where they upload their search results (≈500 articles), apply a range of smart filters (entities, data points and context descriptions) to instantly filter down the list to the ≈30 articles of interest. Then the tool automatically extracts all clinical data points of relevance into a database – both to a short collection of summarizing data points and to a comprehensive 500-point collection. All actions are recorded and a final report draft is automatically generated.

Drug repurposing for an interdisciplinary research group

A Californian research group, funded by the Canadian government, is searching broadly for new drug candidates from western, Chinese and herbal medicine for a specific medical situation. Each researcher starts from an idea, doing a PICO style natural language text search and filters, across a variety of western and alternative research articles. Once an interesting approach is found, the articles are collected and all relevant clinical data is extracted and used to populate a database, made openly accessible to researchers across the world. 

IP analysis for a steel conglomerate

This world-leading steel manufacturer strategically monitors filed IP to spot new market opportunities, but extracting detailed experiment data from patents is incredibly time consuming. Their Workspace allows researchers to provide the system with one or several patents, using that input to identify a range of other patents based on the content. The identified patents can then with one click be sent for extraction, where thousands of data points in text and tables are extracted, linked and mapped to their desired format. 

Academic reviews

Librarians are always searching for better ways to help their students and researchers find the right literature. An academic-oriented Researcher Workspace is connected to all relevant literature sources and allows exploratory searches based on problem descriptions. The tool, with its visual search interface, is especially loved by Master and PhD candidates early in their research careers, with still-unknown topics to explore broadly.

Key takeaways

Each presented use case is distinct, but in every instance we found a suitable process to help companies, research institutes and universities with their scientific knowledge processing needs. Our tools are customized and trained on each client’s domain to optimize results. If you think that we can help you out, contact us! 

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