Creative Discovery Comes To Search

"The stories are pieced together by analyzing large volumes of text or other data," said Naren Ramakrishnan, associate professor of computer science at Virginia Tech. "Everyday, there are new research results reported in the literature and there are discoveries waiting to be made by exploring connections."

"Our minds cannot correlate all available datasets efficiently and with any high degree of confidence without the aid of computational biology," said Richard Helm, associate professor of biochemistry. "Attempting to find significant correlations within the ocean of online datasets is daunting.

"However, there may be experiments that have been published in the literature that look at particular subsets of a biological process. The storytelling algorithm links ‘distant' objects by finding these closer connections and drawing them together in a storyline."