OpportunityMatch — helping users find academic experts with advanced AI technology
OpportunityMatch is an AI driven search tool that enables its users to find academic experts, particularly in areas the users don’t have much prior knowledge. Utilising advanced AI technology, the tool allows ‘similarity-based searching’ of research outputs, finding results most similar to whatever the user is looking for, even if the user doesn’t know all the correct terminology. The tool allows searching by inputting longer pieces of text instead of just concise terms, employing an algorithm that finds similarities between sentences, paragraphs of text and documents. OpportunityMatch is useful for academics, researchers, journalists, businesses and anyone looking for specialist knowledge and expertise.
OpportunityMatch was created by researchers at the University of Edinburgh where it is currently in use. Due to work undertaken by GUSS, the tool now has the potential to be rolled out as a product to external organisations.
Michael Rovatsos of the University of Edinburgh approached GUSS in 2021 for development work on the search engine. He talks about his experience working with GUSS below.
This work has helped us complete a key milestone in the evolution of the project, as we are now able to release a new version that can be opened up to a global user community with appropriate user registration, authentication, and security features in place. We are now able to present it as a more usable and complete web-based application that we could potentially offer to other organisations as a product.
The team brought an excellent mix of skills, and put a strong focus on problem solving, applying a very agile and proactive approach. They were always responsive to client prompts, and flexible in terms of adapting to changes in some requirements as those emerged. It is worth highlighting that the team had to work with code that was very complex, and designed in rather cumbersome ways in places, and they invested a substantial amount of effort into getting to grips with all its peculiarities. Overall, the collaboration was managed very professionally by all involved on the GUSS side.
For more information about OpportunityMatch visit the Bayes Centre website.
