Young people trained to do good science and produce quality publications that are well cited and win awards
April 17, 2025“Elsevier gives us real problems and challenges to work on, and access to great research data. And that enables us to train young people to do good science and produce quality publications that are well cited and win awards … which is the goal of every university professor.” - Dr Frank van Harmelen, Professor in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Frank and his VU colleagues have a long history of working with Elsevier on technology-related projects, as do the University of Amsterdam faculty. So, in 2018, the three parties took steps to formalize their relationship with the launch of the AI-focused Discovery Lab.
The Lab was established as a 5-year project, formally starting in 2020, and will run until December 2025. It has three directors: Frank, Dr Paul Groth opens in new tab/window (UvA’s Professor of Algorithmic Data Science), and Elsevier’s Lead Architect, Dr Rinke Hoekstra opens in new tab/window. Their mission is to develop intelligent services for researchers that enhance how they find and interpret scientific literature and data and formulate their hypotheses.
Elsevier, VU and UvA, with support from the Dutch government, fund three PhD students and two postdocs, who work together with Elsevier researchers in the Lab to tackle these issues via a two-pronged approach...