Mark D. Uhen, Associate Chair and Associate Professor, Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences, received $666,472 from the National Science Foundation for: "Collaborative Research: Geoinformatics: Facility: Paleobiology Database: Preserving and Presenting Ancient Data For Future Research."
With this funding, Uhen and his collaborators will develop and deploy new state-of-the-art machine reading and learning tools to automate key steps in the process of finding and extracting paleontological data from published scientific papers and reports. The primary objective is to decrease the high cost of expert time and effort that is currently required to find and enter new data into the system.
This project will also convene focus groups of both naive and experienced users of the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) when the researchers have a working draft of new data entry tools. This will enable to researchers to determine the usability of those tools.
They will also introduce their new data entry workflows to their user community. They will do this via YouTube videos and a number of workshops.
One group the researchers plan to reach out to specifically is current graduate students. The researchers aim to hold a weeklong PBDB usage workshop specifically targeted to this audience during Summer 2023 on Mason's Fairfax campus.
Funding for this project began in June 2020 and will end in late May 2023.
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