Projects

Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI

Information extraction/Semantic text analysis

  • Neuroallianz D10

    Project D10 aims to identify biological markers that can be used to expedite drug development and improve therapeutic intervention in Epilepsy (EP), Parkinson's Disease (PD) and Alzheimer's Disease (AD). The project is a collaboration between UCB Pharma GmBH and the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (Fraunhofer SCAI) and pursues principally a computational strategy for biomarker discovery.


  • Neuroallianz I2

    To provide fresh impetus to Germany's biopharmaceutical research sector, the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) launched a pharmaceutical research initiative entitled "BioPharma: For the Medicine of Tomorrow". Neuroallianz emerged as one of the winning consortia of the tendering process.


  • Open PHACTS

    To reduce the barriers to drug discovery in industry, academia and for small businesses, the Open PHACTS consortium is building an Open Pharmacological Space (OPS). This will be a freely available platform, integrating pharmacological data from a variety of information resources and providing tools and services to question this integrated data to support pharmacological research. It is a three-year project ending in March 2014.


  • +Spaces

    In governmental models public opinion is often measured with traditional methods like telephone or street surveys. The dynamicity in society can only be captured with tremendous effort. The EC-funded project +Spaces (dubbed "Positive Spaces") aims at the use of popular online communities in which people literally live: platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, or Open Wonderland.

 

completed Projects

  • @neurIST

    When considered separately from other cardiovascular diseases, stroke ranks third among all causes of death, after heart disease and cancer. Worldwide, 3 million women and 2.5 million men die each year from stroke. Hemorrhagic stroke occurs when a blood vessel, typically an aneurysm, ruptures inside the brain. This often leads to severe disability or death. Despite considerable advances in treatment, rupture is associated with exceptionally high levels of morbidity and mortality (about 33% in each case).

  • HTS Data Mining

    Recent efforts to minimize development time and cost of the drug design process led to the automatization of modern drug testing systems (HTS).

  • SIMDAT

    The SIMDAT project aims at developing generic grid technology for the solution of complex application problems and using this new technology in several industrial application sectors.

  • THESEUS

    THESEUS is a research program initiated by the Federal Ministry of Economy and Technology (BMWi), with the goal of developing a new internet-based infrastructure in order to better use and utilize the knowledge available on the Internet.

Applied Chemoinformatics

  • chemoCR

    chemoCR is a system for the reconstruction of chemical information from chemical structure depictions. This tool has been developed to make one of the largest sources of chemical information accessible: the information communicated through images containing chemical structure depictions. Although communication of chemical information through images is quite common amongst chemists, the information contained in images could not be used by machines. chemoCR solves this problem by reconstructing chemical information from images.

HPC and Cloud Computing

  • cloud4health

    Within the Cloud4Health project, SCAI focuses on a secure platform for text mining workflows that can easily and efficiently be deployed in private and public cloud infrastructures. SCAI designs and implements processes and workflows for text mining on clinical data, providing the resulting text mining platform to users from participating clinics. The platform will be made available to external users after the end of the project­. This includes setting up and providing the initial cloud IaaS infrastructure for the text mining platform to be developed. Furthermore, SCAI implements the mechanisms­ to protect the data from unauthorised access, provides the mechanisms for authentication and authorization for accessing data.


  • OPTIMIS

    OPTIMIS is a "software infrastructure-as-a-service" offering that enables organizations to automatically externalize services and applications to best-execution venues in the hybrid cloud model. SCAI´s major contributions to the OPTIMIS toolkit are


  • UIMA HPC

    The explosion of unstructured data available for research and development is a general phenomenon, but it has already become a performance defining factor in the medical and biotechnology / pharmaceutical areas: without ICT-based support tools for automated mining of document data bases, determination and retrieval of strategically important scientific and business information is either untenable or becomes a significant drain on manpower resources. The situation in pharmaceutical and bio-chemistry sectors is made more extreme by the reliance on multimodal information in publications and documents as chemical structures are not just represented in text form but also as structure diagrams.

 

completed Projects

  • BRIDGE

    CNGRID and SIMDAT are major ongoning projects in China as well as in the European Community. Both projects aim at the improvements of existing grid infrastructures driven by concerte application use cases.

  • CoreGRID

    CoreGRID - European Research Network on Foundations, Software Infrastructures and Applications for large scale distributed, GRID and Peer-to-Peer Technologies – is a Network of Excellence (NoE) aiming on integration of the most excellent teams across Europe. It is a European think tank for grid technologies. The NoE has 42 partners from 18 countries and is co-funded by a European grant.

  • D-Grid

    Since september 2005, five Community Projects and the D-Grid Integration Project are working together in the D-Grid framework to build a sustainable grid infrastructure in Germany. Today more than 15 Community Projects are working covering a broad range of application areas from High Energy Physics to Financial Services.

  • IVOM

    For grids today a number of technologies for authorisation are in place, the most prominent being variants of role-based and attribute-based techniques. However, the degree of support for these techniques varies between the different middleware and there is little or no interoperability between the approaches.

  • PHOSPHORUS

    A new generation of scientific applications is emerging that couples scientific instruments, data and high-end computing resources distributed on a global scale. Developed by collaborative, virtual communities, many of these applications have requirements such as determinism (e.g. guaranteed QoS), shared data spaces, large data transfers, that are often achievable only through dedicated optical bandwidth.

  • SmartLM

    Current software licensing practices are limiting the acceleration of grid adoption. Indeed, the rapid emergence of service and virtualization environments requires a rapid evolution in licensing models. SmartLM provides a generic and flexible licensing virtualization technology for new service-oriented business models across organization boundaries.

  • VIOLA

    VIOLA is a research project of multiple partners from universities, research centres, industrial companies and the DFN ("Verein zur Förderung eines Deutschen Forschungsnetzes e.V."). VIOLA is funded by the German ministry for research and education. The main objectives of VIOLA are the test of advanced network architectures, development of software for user-driven dynamical provision of bandwidth, and test of advanced applications in the VIOLA grid environment.

  • VO-Management

    Reliable authentication and authorization are crucial for both service providers and their customers, where the former want to protect their resources from unauthorised access and fraudulent use their customers want to be sure unauthorised access to their data is prevented. In grid environments Virtual Organisations (VO) have been adopted as a means to organize and control access to resources and data based on roles that are assigned to users.