Student project helps fuse link between research and the community

Students Mauro (Acoustical Engineering), Przemek and Maciej are on a mission to help students and researchers discover and share knowledge in a new and innovative way. Working with fellow students, academics, researchers, the Union and FutureWorlds, they have been able to launch their new business called Fusemind.

Tell us about Fusemind and how the project got started:

During our first year of university we would constantly share resources with each other, like cool books or research papers, so we thought it would be fun to create a “crowd-curated database of awesome academic resources” which is exactly what we called it.

We began working on this and started by interviewing around 100 students and researchers to help us validate and improve our idea. We quickly realised that there was a huge problem in the sheer amount of time it takes to find good papers amongst a sea of academic search results so we began adapting our original idea to help solve this problem.

When are you planning to launch the business?

We’ve just launched. You can go ahead and download our browser extension which works with Google Scholar and lets you find the best research papers much faster.

How did you create the product and how does it work?

The heart of FuseMind is made up of our AI algorithms. The aim of these algorithms is to score the relevance of any research paper for any particular individual. Our main algorithm taps into online communities like Twitter, where it looks for mentions of research papers, and analyses the content of those mentions.

Are you working with any researchers across the University?

We’ve received advice from three different PhD students and have talked to many others. Their help has been absolutely crucial in letting us get to where we are today. They’ve pointed us to the most powerful and modern algorithmic tools, as well as giving us important insights and feedback regarding the product. Being immersed in the vibrant research community here at the University has been a huge driver in helping us progress.

How has your degree helped in giving you the experience to create such a unique product?

Our degrees are very different, which we think has really helped as it has brought diversity to the team. We have an Acoustical Engineer, a Computer Scientist and a data-crazed Geographer.

We all have personal experience working on large group projects for our degrees, each covering different areas from data-analysis to rapid-prototyping and performance-assessment. More importantly, accessing a wide variety of technical tools has allowed us to quickly learn how to use new tools as required by new challenges.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has supported our project so far. Every bit of help gets us one step closer to our mission, to create the absolute best imaginable academic search experience.

Find out more on the Fusemind website and contact the team at: contact@fusemind.org.