Steven Vercruysse
Steven Vercruysse
Computer & Life Scientist, Senior Software Engineer, Dr., Affiliate Researcher
Department of Biology Faculty of Natural SciencesBackground and activities
Research summary
Dr. Steven Vercruysse's research focuses on building 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 many more 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.
Research
- Affiliate Researcher - 2020-...
- Researcher at NTNU - 2016-'19
- Visiting Researcher at UC Berkeley / Berkeley Lab - 2019
- Affiliate Researcher - 2011-'14
- Postdoc at NTNU - 2008-'11
Education
- Full-Stack Web Development (JS, AWS) - 2015
- PhD in Biotechnology (Computational Biology) at Ghent University - 2008
- MSc in Computer Science - 2002
- MSc in Physics - 2000
Scientific, academic and artistic work
Displaying a selection of activities. See all publications in the database
2020
- (2020) The Minimum Information about a Molecular Interaction Causal Statement (MI2CAST). Bioinformatics.
2019
- (2019) A bold vision for computable scientific knowledge. https://www.ntnutechzone.no/en/2019/06/a-bold-vision-for-com [Internett]. 2019-06-27.
- (2019) vsmjs: a GitHub project consisting of multiple modules, to capture knowledge with the VSM user-interface. GitHub, https://github.com/vsmjs. 2019.
2018
- (2018) The VSM-pages: How to Easily Plant Complex Ideas into Computers.
2016
- (2016) Gene regulation knowledge commons: community action takes care of DNA binding transcription factors. Database: The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation.
- (2016) SciCura: Shared, General-purpose Curation in the Life Sciences. Biocuration 2016 ; 2016-04-10 - 2016-04-14.
2013
- (2013) WordVis: JavaScript and Animation to Visualize the WordNet Relational Dictionary. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing. vol. 179.
2012
- (2012) Putting Semantics in Systems Biology. META. vol. 2012 (3).
- (2012) Putting Semantics in Systems Biology. NTNU Bioinformatics Network Seminar 2012 Norwegian Bioinformatics Forum 2012 . Norwegian Bioinformatics Forum; Trondheim. 2012-10-18 - 2012-10-19.
- (2012) Jointly creating digital abstracts: dealing with synonymy and polysemy. BMC Research Notes. vol. 5 (601).
- (2012) OLSVis: an animated, interactive visual browser for bio-ontologies. BMC Bioinformatics. vol. 13.