Digital Science Catalyst Grant Awarded To San Francisco Startup, Etalia
Grant awarded to cloud-based platform that aims to improve scholarly dialogue
San Francisco, California, USA – Wednesday 7th September 2016: Digital Science, a business division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and a leading global technology incubator focused on jumpstarting innovation in the research community, announced today that early-stage startup Etalia has been awarded a Catalyst Grant.
The Digital Science Catalyst Grant is an international initiative to support the innovation of new software tools and technologies for research. The program supports and invests in early stage ideas in the novel use of information technology in research, with a grant awarded to the most promising ideas to aid science and further education research.
San Francisco Bay area based Etalia are building a powerful cloud-based scholarly communications portal that empowers personalized literature searches and enables valuable scholarly dialogues that go beyond a researcher’s usual contacts. Traditionally, scholars have had limited resources both to find relevant literature and also to enable engagement beyond their peers and small networks of colleagues – meaning valuable intellectual input may often remain unutilized. Etalia have developed a unique digital platform that aims to make this process more efficient.
Etalia was founded by Norbert Schuff, a medical physicist and professor at UCSF and Nicolas Pannetier, a physicist engineer who worked at UCSF as a researcher. At the core of their innovation lies modern text-mining and machine learning technology. Etalia creates personalised “text-fingerprints” based on the personal reference libraries of individual scholars. Fingerprint matching then empowers personalized literature searches, article recommendation and scholarly dialogues around subject matters.
The team will use the Catalyst Grant money to drive forward the growth of their platform, currently in beta stage.
Norbert Schuff, co-founder of Etalia said:
“Etalia is honored to receive the Digital Science Catalyst Grant. It is in recognition of the importance of breaking down the barriers to effective communication and collaboration around research. This funding will allow us to extend our platform with more content-based communication features for scholars.”
Steve Scott, Director of Portfolio Development at Digital Science adds:
“Etalia impressed us during the Catalyst Grant process with their innovative new technology and ambitious goals to enable easier and more effective engagement in the research community. Digital Science is constantly looking at ways to make it easier for researchers to discover share and collaborate on content more efficiently, so we immediately saw value in what Norbert and his team are trying to achieve.”
Etalia joins two other companies who have also been awarded Catalyst Grants.
