Researcher’s Toolbox: ‘EILEEN’ Dr. Acuna Devises Easier, Faster Way to Find Competitors, Collaborators and Funding Sources E I L E E N: Exploratory Innovator of LitEraturE Networks
W Daniel Acuna
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hat if there was a fast, automatic way for scientists, researchers, pre-award grant workers and others looking for research monies and funding sources to automatically discover who else is working on the same types of projects, and where the funds might exist to sponsor their research? That would be efficient, useful and it could revolutionize the way program officers evaluate proposals and how researchers find fundable ideas, thought Assistant Professor Daniel Acuna. So, he came up with an idea for creating an online data collection tool and recommendation system he calls “EILEEN,” which stands for “Exploratory Innovator of LitEraturE Networks.” The tool creates a unified dataset that captures diverse scientific disciplines and federal grant award types, helping researchers find similar published research on specific topics, appropriate funding opportunities and relevant grant sources much faster than they could normally. It also lets them discover who else in their field might be working on similar projects, thus be either potential project collaborators or funding competitors. The tool also allows users to look at specific project titles to assess whether similar works have been funded in the past, the kinds of organizations that have sponsored those projects, and the particular approach that attracted successful grant awards. Dr. Acuna was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant totaling $168,712 for the project, formally titled, “Improving Scientific Innovation by Linking Funding and Scholarly Literature. The monies, an NSF EAGER (Earlyconcept Grants for Exploratory Research) grant, are to be used over three years (2016 through 2018). EAGER grants are designed specifically THE iSCHOOL @ SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
“It’s a system that will help both scientists and pre-award grant developers, and essentially anyone at a college or university doing any kind of active research. The tool helps them find similar publications and grants to what they themselves are proposing.” — DANIEL ACUNA, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
to fund potentially transformative or exploratory research that explores new subjects, different methods or interdisciplinary approaches.
CREATING THE “BRAIN” Over the course of 2017, Acuna developed a working model of a search engine “brain,” a webbased navigational tool. It’s designed to help in the scoping and planning of funded research projects via an automated recommendation system. Using a few key words, the system looks for publications and grants across certain scholarly areas. Beyond merely a search engine, as the user saves and rejects information, the tool learns and fine-tunes both current searches and those on like areas in the future. The scope of the search is wide. Over the past year, the EILEEN team has worked on the project with datasets that include about 28 million publications and 3 million grants, Acuna says. The tool generates instantaneous reports about publications, grants, scientists and organizations related to users’ particular interests. “It’s a system that will help both scientists and pre-award grant developers, and essentially anyone at a college or university doing any kind of active research. The tool helps them find similar publica-
