title: Collaborative mining and interpretation of large-scale data for biomedical research insights.
abstract: Biomedical research becomes increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative in nature. Researchers need to efficiently and effectively collaborate and make decisions by meaningfully assembling, mining and analyzing available large-scale volumes of complex multi-faceted data residing in different sources. In line with related research directives revealing that, in spite of the recent advances in data mining and computational analysis, humans can easily detect patterns which computer algorithms may have difficulty in finding, this paper reports on the practical use of an innovative web-based collaboration support platform in a biomedical research context. Arguing that dealing with data-intensive and cognitively complex settings is not a technical problem alone, the proposed platform adopts a hybrid approach that builds on the synergy between machine and human intelligence to facilitate the underlying sense-making and decision making processes. User experience shows that the platform enables more informed and quicker decisions, by displaying the aggregated information according to their needs, while also exploiting the associated human intelligence.
authors.affiliation: School of Chemical Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece.
authors.forename: Georgia
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Tsiliki
authors.affiliation: University of Patras and Computer Technology Institute & Press 'Diophantus', Patras, Greece.
authors.forename: Nikos
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Karacapilidis
authors.affiliation: University of Patras and Computer Technology Institute & Press 'Diophantus', Patras, Greece.
authors.forename: Spyros
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Christodoulou
authors.affiliation: University of Patras and Computer Technology Institute & Press 'Diophantus', Patras, Greece.
authors.forename: Manolis
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tzagarakis
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000458:organization & administration*; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D057225:Data Mining / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination; D012984:Software