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National Research Council projects seen but not heard
This past August, the Canada's National Research Council signed an agreement with Waterloo, ONbased ThinkTank Technologies and The University of Ottawa to develop what ThinkTank has named the virtual research assistant.
"The project is working on the fundamental problems of information overload and making information useful to people," says Dr. Martin Brooks, leader of the Interactive Information Group within the NRC's Institute for Information Technology. "It's an attack on those problems."
Brooks says the key elements needed for working with information are organization, summarization, keeping information current and being able to communicate that information to other colleagues so they, in turn, can respond with more information. The virtual research assistant tool will filter the information for relevance to a user's particular interest. It then organizes and summarizes it because, he says, "one of the scarcest resources for people today is the time and attention it takes to read things."
ThinkTank Technologies has licensed some of the background technology that comes out of Brook's group's laboratory. In particular, the lab's Clustifier which organizes collections of documents into groups having similar...