Sparrho combines human and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

to help research professionals and layman users stay up-to-date with new scientific publications and patents. Sparrho's recommendation engine provides personalized scientific news-feeds by using proprietary

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

algorithms to "aggregate, distill and recommend" relevant content. The platform aims to complement traditional methods of finding relevant academic material such as

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...

and

PubMed PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain the ...

with a system which enables the serendipitous discovery of content and across relevant scientific fields.

Recommendation engine

Sparrho uses a "three pronged approach" to content recommendation. Firstly, "data-data analysis" is tackled using techniques such as

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

to provide appropriate research based on data provided by users. Secondly, "user-user interactions" are utilized to propose a wider range of potentially relevant subject areas to users with similar interests . Finally, "user-data interactions" such as labeling articles as "relevant" or "irrelevant" within a particular scientific field allows Sparrho to personalize user newsfeeds.

History

Sparrho was founded in 2013 by Vivian Chan and Nilu Satharasinghe as a solution to issues Chan encountered over the course of her biochemistry PhD at the University of Cambridge, especially in staying up to date with scientific literature Initially established at Ideaspace in West Cambridge, and moving subsequently to Camden Collective and the Ministry of Startups in London, the company is now based in the data science hub SHACK15 in Shoreditch, London. In 2014, Chan was a semi-finalist for the 2014 Duke of York New Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and in 2015, Chan was included on the 35 Women Under 35 list compiled by

Management Today Haymarket Media Group is a privately held media company headquartered in London. It has publications in the consumer, business and customer sectors, both print and online. It operates exhibitions allied to its own publications, and previously on ...

. In 2016, Sparrho was a semi-finalist in Pitch@Palace 5.0. As of July 2017, Sparrho has raised $3 million from investors including White Cloud Capital, AllBright, and Beast Ventures.

Competitors

Sparrho's primary competitors are PubChase and Scizzle, though both PubChase and Scizzle are targeted towards biomedical sciences and solely recommend academic journal papers.

References

External links

* {{Official website, http://www.sparrho.com Search engine software Scholarly search services

Recommendation engine

History

Competitors

See also

References

External links