Elsevier announces Grand Challenge winners

Elsevier has announced the winners of the Elsevier Grand Challenge. The competition, launched in June 2008, invited researchers to prototype tools dealing with the increasing amount of online life sciences information.

The first prize has been awarded to  Sean I. O’Donoghue, Lars Jensen, Heiki Horn, Evangelos Pafilis, Michael Kuhn, Nigel P. Brown and Reinhard Schneider, EMBL Germany, for their project 'Reflect: Automated Annotation of Scientific Terms.'

The second prize was given to: Vit Novacek, Tudor Groza and Siegfried Handschuh, DERI, Ireland, for their project 'CORAAL—Dive into Publications, Bathe in the Knowledge.'

The first and second prize winners were announced at the Experimental Biology conference in New Orleans and chosen from four finalist teams. Each of the four Grand Challenge finalists gave a demonstration of their tool and responded to questions from the panel of judges and an audience of life science researchers.  They then answered questions from a live online audience of researchers attending virtually via the Elsevier Grand Challenge Q&A webinar.

'I was impressed not only with the quality of the tools the finalists developed, but with the atmosphere of collaboration,' added Herman van Campenhout, CEO of Elsevier. 'We feel, more than ever, that by listening to what researchers want, and by partnering with members of the community to co-develop tools to improve scientific communication, we can create some very innovative solutions together.'