Usability Evaluation of Aficionado

In recent years, Irish third level institutions have experienced a reduction in funding for individual research and increased funding for collaborations with industry. The latter is facilitated through the use of “Innovation vouchers.”. The idea behind innovation vouchers is encapsulated by the tagline “collaborate to innovate.” According to our client, the funds allocated towards the innovation vouchers were not fully used because of the difficulty in finding experts with whom to collaborate. In order to provide easy access to information about the experts for the users, Aficionado was developed. It aims to support technology transfer officers to keep track of experts, their collaborations, skillset and expertise to help them connect industry partners with experts in the universities in Ireland. Although, it was developed for the Irish market, it is applicable to other markets as well. The site collates information by data mining institutional repositories and other trusted data sources. The profiles of experts are generated Usability Evaluation of Aficionado 9 automatically by using technologies such as data mining, machine learning and natural language processing from structured or unstructured data sources.