We congratulate Dr Rakesh David on achieving the Proof of Concept grant from the University of Adelaide on his project regarding the application of artificial intelligence to accelerate biological discovery.
To carry out this project, Rakesh and his team have partnered up with researchers and students in the School of Computer Science located at the North Terrace campus. This example of interdisciplinary cooperation helps reduce the boundaries between biology and computational biology – a field that Rakesh is immensely passionate about.
Together with his team, Rakesh aims to see if he can teach an algorithm to read scientific literature so that information can be automatically extracted. Similar to how connections are made in the brain and memories are stored, artificial intelligence can be trained to route neural networks. In these networks, the literature is correlated and analysed, and made easy to curate and access. This addresses the exponential growth of biological data published in primary literature, so much so that scientists have trouble keeping up with it. In future, this problem will only worsen as more information is published than can be properly analysed and applied, creating knowledge gaps and slowing the discovery process.
Although the project is still in its early stages, the team has made significant progress and have successfully demonstrated Proof of Concept that their computational platform can be used to analyse scientific literature and integrate biological data from thousands of published studies. The team is now preparing a manuscript describing their results which they aim to publish towards the end of 2018. If you are interested in learning more about this project you can contact Rakesh at rakesh.david@adelaide.edu.au.