Researcher Expertise Dashboard – Phase 2
Project phases
- Phase 1 - Fostering Research and Innovation with the Researcher Expertise Dashboard
- Phase 2 - Researcher Expertise Dashboard - Phase 2 (current page)
- Phase 3 - Researcher Expertise Portal - Phase 3
The Innovation Partnerships team, in collaboration with the UBC Cloud Innovation Centre (UBC CIC), has developed a prototype to help identify potential research collaborations. The prototype aggregates available data, primarily from the STEAM area, on research activity into one dashboard.
In this second phase, the Innovation Partnerships team worked with the UBC CIC to add relevant federal grant information into the dashboard in addition to the researcher publication data developed in phase one. This helps amplify potential research collaboration opportunities.
Approach
The current prototype dashboard presents an organized view of UBC profiles, including information such as departments, faculties, areas of interest, publications, and publication-associated citations. In this phase, the UBC CIC uses AWS tools and technology to optimize the dashboard, making the data pipeline enterprise-accessible.
The prototype aggregates available information on federal research funding and uses multiple techniques to normalize data from disparate federal data sources. By incorporating this additional relevant information, the dashboard allows for further identification of collaboration opportunities.
Additional search features are included to find researchers and collaborators, and to narrow the scope by relevant funding type, including project title, research program, and the project start and end dates.
Supporting Artifacts
Architecture Diagram
User Interface
Screenshots of the Researcher Expertise Dashboard’s user interface. Due to the static nature of the screenshots, personal data has been redacted.
The filter function for grants
A researcher grant profile
Technical Details
All grant information can be accessed from federal research funding agencies. The user is able to download the data, in the form of CSV files, into an S3 Bucket under their respective subfolders. When the Lambda function that monitors S3 detects a file upload event, it triggers a series of downstream Glue jobs to clean the data.
Upon storing the cleaned CSV files in AWS S3, a Lambda function will invoke the next Glue job, which uses Jaro-Winkler distance to match every researcher’s first and last names from the clean CSV files against all records in our PostgreSQL researcher database. Once a match is determined, it is assigned a unique ID associated with that particular researcher. The CSV files with matched IDs are then uploaded to the S3 bucket. The final Glue job stores this data in the PostgreSQL database, ready for the front-end solution to display it in the dashboard.
Acknowledgements
UBC Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation
Photo by: Chokniti Khongchum on Pexels
About the University of British Columbia Cloud Innovation Centre (UBC CIC)
UBC’s CIC is a public-private collaboration between UBC and Amazon. A CIC identifies digital transformation challenges, the problems or opportunities that matter to the community, and provides subject matter expertise and CIC leadership.
Using Amazon’s innovation methodology, dedicated UBC and Amazon CIC staff will work with students, staff and faculty, as well as community, government or not-for-profit organizations to define challenges, to engage with subject matter experts, to identify a solution, and to build a Proof of Concept (PoC). Through co-op and work-integrated learning, students also have an opportunity to learn new skills which they will later be able to apply in the workforce.
UBC’s CIC focuses on Community Health and Wellbeing.
