The AskNature team needs your expertise!

For the past several years our team has been investigating ways to improve the quality and breadth of ​the biology content available on asknature.org. One of the challenges we currently face is that the process of manually assigning functions and living systems to biological strategy records is time consuming and requires quite a bit of specialized knowledge. So earlier this year we started working with a small group of data scientists and programmers to automate these components of AskNature's content generation process via several machine learning algorithms. If we're successful, future content contributors will be able to quickly select from these algorithms' top recommendations rather than having to manually choose options from long lists, ultimately providing content consumers with a much broader diversity of fodder for biological inspiration.

The recommendations this tool makes will only be as good as the associations we manually teach it, and with your help, we hope to generate enough associated data to get started. 

Participating is easy; our colleagues have created a short online survey in which you'll read the title and abstract of a biology article and then identify key concepts described therein. Each time you take this survey you’ll be helping this algorithm make associations accurately and consistently. 

Visit this guide for more information and some example submissions. Then take the survey as many (or as few) times as you’d like—every bit helps.

Please forward this email to your colleagues, students, or anyone else you think may be interested in participating. Our goal of 10,000+ submissions within the next month is lofty, but is achievable as long as enough folks participate. 

Thank you for everything you do! Please send any questions or comments directly to me at ethan [dot] smith [at] biomimicry [dot] org

0
Your rating: None
Groups:
randomness