Throughout this year SICSA has been working closely with Glasgow-based web and graphic design agency, Red Empire, to develop a brand new SICSA web site; which launched on 13th August. The project came to fruition as a result of a communications review in late 2013 – at that time the SICSA Directors agreed that the pool required a high quality web site, befitting of a world class research cluster.
Alongside the new web site, Dr Iadh Ounis and Dr Craig MacDonald of the University of Glasgow developed a new SICSA Experts Finder search engine, which has been integrated into the new site. Of the search engine, Craig MacDonald said: “SICSA builds upon the number of excellent researchers working in close proximity in Scotland, and by working cooperatively we can develop and extend Scotland’s research position in Computing Science and Informatics. However, knowing who to cooperate with in SICSA can sometime be challenging. Often people ask themselves or others: who is it that has done research about a similar problem?”
To address this challenge, Iadh and Craig developed the SICSA Experts Finder search engine. The search engine allows you to enter a query, and receive a ranking of SICSA academics who are predicted to have relevant expertise, based around their recent publications. So far, they have collected 23,000 publications for 1585 academics across the SICSA institutions. So, when you’re looking for someone in SICSA to help you with ‘mobile search’, ‘information retrieval’ or anything else, then check out the Experts Finder!
Special thanks go to the team at Red Empire – Adam and Scott; Steven Kendrick (SICSA Executive Officer); and Nicola Hogg (SICSA Executive Assistant) who have put many hours of hard work and creativity into the project from beginning to end. Thanks also go to the Experts Finder developers, Craig MacDonald and Iadh Ounis and their team at the University of Glasgow.
