Digital Notebooks for Enhanced Accessibility to Scientific Research
Throughout the year-long timeline, the project entitled “Digital Notebooks for Enhanced Accessibility to Scientific Research” has seen immense progress, moving from the idea phase to becoming a fully-fledged mobile application. The base platform has been created and several features have been put in place, such as Optical character recognition (OCR) which converts handwritten text or text from PDF files to other formats; features to annotate papers so that users may read their comments, at a future date; and speech-to-text functionality which is useful for situations where it may be more convenient to make notes via speech rather than text, such as recording readings while experimenting.
The project was selected to participate in the second edition of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings Sciathon, last year. The event proved useful for clarifying and iterating on several design choices and features currently in place for the application in the early stages. In particular, he has partnered with Cientina, an Argentinian science communication student group, with the goal of leveraging its wide user base to generate a critical mass of users for the base deployment.
