Mapping ideas across disciplines

Two biologists and a physicist are creating a system that will help researchers identify patterns in scholarly literature and get a sense of how ideas flow from one field to another. Using the algorithms they’re developing, users will be able to create citation maps, like the one above. Another aspect of the project is a recommendation engine that will help scholars discover related articles from other fields that they might never have found otherwise.

So what’s the hardest part of this whole colossal project? Real-world applications—how to figure out what researchers really want and will be able to use:

“What I find most challenging right now is how to build the proper user interface. What would people want? That’s even harder than the algorithmic problems we’re facing at this stage.”