2011 Annual Science Report
University of Hawaii, Manoa Reporting | SEP 2010 – AUG 2011
AIRFrame Technical Infrastructure and Visualization Software Evaluation
Project Summary
We have analyzed over four thousand astrobiology articles from the scientific press, published over ten years to search for clues about their underlying connections. This information can be used to build tools and technologies that guide scientists quickly across vast, interdisciplinary libraries towards the diverse works of most relevance to them.
Project Progress
AIRFrame analyzes published and unpublished documents to identify and visualize implicit relationships between astrobiology’s diverse constituent fields. The main goal of the AIRFrame project is to allow researchers and the public to discover related information from different disciplines.
During the reporting period, AIRFrame researchers harvested and analyzed over four thousand astrobiology publications and cited works over ten years, and compared the results of several bibliometric and computational document clustering methods to provide a measurement of the interdisciplinarity of astrobiology researchers, teams and papers, to reveal implicit connections between them, and to problematize the assignment of papers to rigid topical categories in scientific databases. By analyzing not just the text of astrobiology papers but also the abstracts of the papers they cite, we hope to transcend some of the semantic barriers between researchers from different fields, and develop a robust method to reveal implicit connections across all NAI teams, and interdisciplinary scientific collaborations more generally. We are also developing a new algorithm for selecting which words in a corpus of astrobiology documents contribute the most to the mutual information between the words and the documents, to generate data-driven topic labels for astrobiology document subsets, and evaluate the extent to which NAI goals and subgoals are being addressed by NAI research output.
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PROJECT INVESTIGATORS:
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PROJECT MEMBERS:
Mike Gowanlock
Graduate Student
Lisa Miller
Graduate Student
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RELATED OBJECTIVES:
Objective 1.1
Formation and evolution of habitable planets.
Objective 1.2
Indirect and direct astronomical observations of extrasolar habitable planets.
Objective 2.1
Mars exploration.
Objective 2.2
Outer Solar System exploration
Objective 3.1
Sources of prebiotic materials and catalysts
Objective 3.2
Origins and evolution of functional biomolecules
Objective 3.3
Origins of energy transduction
Objective 3.4
Origins of cellularity and protobiological systems
Objective 4.1
Earth's early biosphere.
Objective 4.2
Production of complex life.
Objective 4.3
Effects of extraterrestrial events upon the biosphere
Objective 5.1
Environment-dependent, molecular evolution in microorganisms
Objective 5.2
Co-evolution of microbial communities
Objective 5.3
Biochemical adaptation to extreme environments
Objective 6.1
Effects of environmental changes on microbial ecosystems
Objective 6.2
Adaptation and evolution of life beyond Earth
Objective 7.1
Biosignatures to be sought in Solar System materials
Objective 7.2
Biosignatures to be sought in nearby planetary systems