New studio manager Petr Knoth for the research studio Data Science

Focus on Big Data Analytics and Open Data for research and the arts

The Research Studio Data Science has a new studio manager since the beginning of 2020: Dr. Petr Knoth. The previous studio manager Dr. Mihai Lupu is leaving the RSA FG for the USA and private industry. With major projects such as Data Market Austria, Safe-DEED and others and with a focus on Patent Information Retrieval, Fraud Detection and Predictive Medicine, Mihai Lupu has significantly advanced the studio and thus data science in Austria. He now hands over to Dr. Petr Knoth, an internationally renowned expert for Big Data, Text Analytics and Open Data.

For the year 2020, a continuation of the current projects is initially planned. However, Petr Knoth will also set new accents in the areas of Open Data and cooperation with the arts: “In addition to all the current and new projects, our strategy for this year is to further develop our data science capacities in order to support data-driven innovation as well as open research and the arts even more strongly than before”.

About his commitment at the RSA FG, Petr Knoth says: “I am thrilled to have been given the opportunity to head the Research Studio Data Science of the RSA FG. We are starting or have already started a number of really exciting applied projects in the fields of big data and text analysis for fraud detection, safety and health. In the future, we will work even more closely with world-leading information retrieval experts to gain fundamental insights into how users store and access information in professional environments. It is this combination of basic and applied research that makes the RSA FG a unique research center. I would like to thank Prof. Peter A. Bruck for his confidence in me and Dr. Mihai Lupu, the outgoing director of the Data Science Studio, for his professional support in transferring the project portfolio”.

The vita of Petr Knoth: founder of CORE and Open Data pioneer

Dr. Petr Knoth will continue as a Senior Research Fellow in the field of text and data mining at the Open University in England, where he heads the Big Scientific Data and Text Analytics Group.

In 2011, Petr Knoth founded CORE, the world’s largest full-text aggregation of Open Access papers, which also functions as the UK National Aggregator of Research Papers. It comprises more than 15 million full-text papers, has about ten million active users per month and is one of the top 5,000 websites worldwide – measured by the user engagement of the Alexa Global Rank. In 2019, CORE won the Outstanding Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity Award at the Research Excellence Awards 2019 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Open University.

Prior to this, Petr Knoth worked as a Senior Data Scientist at Mendeley/Elsevier on information extraction and content recommendation for research.

Petr Knoth has been involved in more than 20 national and international research projects as a (lead) researcher, has established collaborations with innovative companies in the field of data sciences and has provided the Open University with approximately 3.5 million euros in funding over the past five years. Petr Knoth has authored or co-authored more than 60 publications, received two Best Paper Awards from the world’s leading Digital Libraries conferences, and delivered more than 50 invited talks. The results of his work, especially the FOSTER and CORE projects, have been reported several times in media articles in Nature, Times Higher Education and Physics Today.