Background and activities

 

Research summary

Dr. Steven Vercruysse's research focus is to build a bridge between human and computer understanding.

His main work is a user-friendly language & tool (VSM) that helps scientists (like biologists) to manually collect and encode any kind of information from the scientific literature, into a computable form. In a single interface, one can capture diverse research findings, with full contextual details. One can represent any type of complex knowledge into a precise, computable, and easily-readable form.

Read more: introduction to VSM & SciCura, and blog-post on NTNU TechZone.

Research goals

  • To apply the VSM method to additional research areas where complex knowledge needs to be managed in a computable form.
  • To connect VSM to existing technologies: both to semantic, defeasible, automated reasoning; and to explainable machine learning.
  • To develop an interdisciplinary, open platform (SciCura) where scientists can transform the results of any scientific publication into a computation-ready form. (Like a Wikipedia, where each page corresponds to a research paper, but showing all its new findings in a form that is both human- and computer-understandable).
    This forms the basis for automated reasoning assistance over large-scale, real-world knowledge; i.e. a digital brain to address society's most intricate problems, which involve complex systems (like cancer, brain, climate, security).

Opportunities

We look for new partnerships and funding for this broadly applicable knowledge-capturing method. The technology can definitely facilitate the many projects where it is essential to collect and integrate computable knowledge.

Additional use-cases also serve as inspiration to mature VSM and fulfill its potential for global applicability.

Education

  • MSc in Physics - 2000
  • MSc in Computer Science - 2002
  • PhD in Biotechnology (Computational Biology) at Ghent University - 2008
  • Full-Stack Web Development - 2015

Research

  • PostDoc at NTNU - 2008-'11
  • Associated Researcher - 2011-'15
  • Researcher at NTNU - 2016-'19
    • Visiting Researcher at Berkeley Lab - 2019
  • Independent Consultant, Researcher - 2020

 

 

Scientific, academic and artistic work

Displaying a selection of activities. See all publications in the database

2016

2012