ALPSP Awards
Larry H Bernstein, MD, FCAP, Curator
Leaders in Pharmaceutical Intelligence
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2015/9/10/larryhbern/ALPSP Awards
Series E. 2; 8.10
ALPSP Awards Spotlight on… Bookmetrix from Altmetric and Springer
http://blog.alpsp.org/2015/08/alpsp-awards-spotlight-on-bookmetrix.html
| Martijn Roelandse |
In the fifth of the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing finalists’ postsMartijn Roelandse Springer’s Manager for Publishing Innovation and Euan Adie,Founder of Altmetric and fellow co-developer ofBookmetrix, talk about how they worked to launch the product.
Tell us a bit about both companies and how this collaboration came about.
As a large publisher of STM content, with a current catalogue of over 194,000 books, Springer is always keen to offer further services for our authors and editors – in particular in relation to the insight into the attention, use and impact of their titles.
Altmetric are a data science company based in London. Founded in 2011, Altmetric made it their mission to track and analyse the online activity around scholarly literature, and today supply data via their distinctive ‘donut’ badges and platforms to many of the world’s leading publishers, funders and institutions.
| Euan Adie |
The idea for this project was originally conceived at Springer, who wanted to find new ways to offer added value and additional feedback to the authors and readers of their extensive book content.
In addition, Springer also wanted to offer their editorial and marketing teams an easier way of tracking the reach and impact of their publishing portfolio, and were keen to offer further insight than download and citation counts alone would be able to provide.
Having first established a relationship Altmetric in 2011 with the adoption of the Altmetric API for all of their journal articles, Springer were familiar with the Altmetric team and felt there would be a shared approach and understanding of what the project was trying to achieve.
What is the project that you submitted for the Awards?
We submitted Bookmetrix – the first platform of its kind to help authors, editors, publishers and readers to track the broader impacts of a book or chapter once it’s published. The project encompassed two parts; public-facing details pages, which are now accessible via the metrics displayed on every SpringerLink book page, and the Bookmetrix search interface – a database which Springer staff can use to browse and filter the metrics across their book portfolio.
Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it.
Bookmetrix was built as a partnership between Altmetric and Springer – regular meetings between the two groups (comprising project leaders, product managers, and developers) ensured that we agreed goals and concept early on. The aim was to offer authors and readers a totally new way to see and understand the impact of their work and to help set a new standard for monitoring and reporting the activity surrounding a book post publication. To achieve this, we worked to pull in mentions and other online activity relating to each book or chapter from a variety of different sources – including downloads, citations, book reviews, public policy, mainstream media coverage and social media shares.
The data was then surfaced via the details pages – where users can see a summary of the mentions of the whole book, and dig down to view the mentions for each chapter and the original comments from each source. The details pages can be accessed via the SpringerLink platform and via the search interface (by Springer staff).
Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?
Bookmetrix is the first platform of it’s kind to bring together such a valuable mixture of traditional and non-traditional indicators of broader impact and influence for books and individual chapters. Such measures are increasingly important for authors who are asked by funders or institutional management to demonstrate the influence of their work – and are particularly valuable for those who do not chose to publish journal articles (which often bring the most credit) as their main form of research output.
As well as offering this additional insight, Bookmetrix has demonstrated the value that can be found in publishers combining their objectives with the technical and domain expertise of an external partner.
What are your plans for the future?
The scope of Bookmetrix is wider than existing initiatives in the market: it covers substantially more books and goes beyond pure citation data. Bookmetrix fits in Springer’s ambition to drive more industry-wide initiatives to support the work of authors and researchers.
Customizing 3-D printing
Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office
A new Web-based interface for design novices allows a wide range of modifications to a basic design—such as a toy car or a black-and-white “yin-yang” cup—that are guaranteed to be both structurally stable and printable on a 3-D printer. Courtesy of the researchers (edited by MIT News)
http://www.rdmag.com/sites/rdmag.com/files/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1×250.jpg
The technology behind 3-D printing is growing more and more common, but the ability to create designs for it is not. Any but the simplest designs require expertise with computer-aided design (CAD) applications, and even for the experts, the design process is immensely time consuming.
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel aim to change that, with a new system that automatically turns CAD files into visual models that users can modify in real time, simply by moving virtual sliders on a Web page. Once the design meets the user’s specifications, he or she hits the print button to send it to a 3-D printer.
“We envision a world where everything you buy can potentially be customized, and technologies such as 3-D printing promise that that might be cost-effective,” says Masha Shugrina, an MIT graduate student in computer science and engineering and one of the new system’s designers. “So the question we set out to answer was, ‘How do you actually allow people to modify digital designs in a way that keeps them functional?’”
For a CAD user, modifying a design means changing numerical values in input fields and then waiting for as much as a minute while the program recalculates the geometry of the associated object.
Once the design is finalized, it has to be tested using simulation software. For designs intended for 3-D printers, compliance with the printers’ specifications is one such test. But designers typically test their designs for structural stability and integrity as well. Those tests can take anywhere from several minutes to several hours, and they need to be rerun every time the design changes.
Advance work
Shugrina and her collaborators—her thesis advisor, Wojciech Matusik, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, and Ariel Shamir of IDC Herzliya—are trying to turn visual design into something novices can do in real time. They presented their new system, dubbed “Fab Forms,” at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Siggraph conference, in August.
Fab Forms begins with a design created by a seasoned CAD user. It then sweeps through a wide range of values for the design’s parameters—the numbers that a CAD user would typically change by hand—calculating the resulting geometries and storing them in a database.
For each of those geometries, the system also runs a battery of tests, specified by the designer, and it again stores the results. The whole process would take hundreds of hours on a single computer, but in their experiments, the researchers distributed the tasks among servers in the cloud.
In their experiments, the researchers used eight designs, including a high-heeled shoe, a chess set, a toy car, and a coffee mug. The system samples enough values of the design parameters to offer a good approximation of all the available options, but that number varies from design to design. In some cases, it was only a few thousand samples, but in others it was hundreds of thousands. The researchers also developed some clever techniques to exploit similarities in design variations to compress the data, but the largest data set still took up 17 gigabytes of memory.
Intuitive interface
Finally, the system generates a user interface, a Web page that can be opened in an ordinary browser. The interface consists of a central window, which displays a 3-D model of an object, and a group of sliders, which vary the parameters of the object’s design. The system automatically weeds out all the parameter values that lead to unprintable or unstable designs, so the sliders are restricted to valid designs.
Moving one of the sliders—changing the height of the shoe’s heel, say, or the width of the mug’s base—sweeps through visual depictions of the associated geometries, presenting in real time what would take hours to calculate with a CAD program. “The sample density is high enough that it looks continuous to the user,” Matusik says.
If, however, a particularly sharp-eyed user wanted a value for a parameter that fell between two of the samples stored in the database, the system can call up the CAD program, calculate the associated geometry, and then run tests on it. That might take several minutes, but at that point, the user will have a good idea of what the final design should look like.
3-D Printing Simplifies, Speeds and Amplifies R&D Efforts
Ed Graham, Engineering Manager, ProtoCAM
When it comes to R&D, complexity often hinders innovation. Product development tailored to customer needs and efficient processes are the ultimate goals. Low-volume, highly specialized, complex products and cyclical, iterative processes are what R&D teams require. And these are what 3-D printing can deliver.
Although 3-D printing techniques have been around for decades, early results were often primitive and used primarily as quick-turn-around rapid prototypes. Additive manufacturing materials developed a reputation as delicate or brittle. Today, 3-D printed pieces can be made from functional materials suited to real-world testing with small, intricate or snap-fit pieces. These pieces can be post-processed in a way to make full analysis of a particular design not only possible, but better.
Product development and innovation are second only to prototyping as the top use for 3-D printing. Advances in additive manufacturing materials and methods are allowing R&D engineers and industrial scientists to shorten timelines, eliminate design for manufacturablity challenges and create parts with intelligent functionality—such as variable elasticity or embedded, printed electronics.
Simply put, modern, industrial 3-D printing has the ability to simplify, speed and amplify growth for R&D teams, and can unlock new possibilities both today and well into the future.
Shorten R&D timelines
Adapting designs quickly, making changes on the fly and speeding time to market are key ways 3-D printing and additive manufacturing are making R&D efforts more efficient. Nike made news last year for using 3-D printing to design the fastest cleat in history, in the shortest turnaround time to date. A design and engineering process that would normally have taken Nike two or three years, took just six months by relying on 3-D printing.
Fabricating a prototype for form, fit and functional testing with traditional manufacturing has always been a slow and expensive proposition. Some materials are difficult to machine, or hard to get in sizes large enough, for subtractive methods. For injection molding, users must first build a tool and, if a feature is discovered that doesn’t work quite right, or could be positioned more efficiently, users must send the tool back for a change. Lead times for tooling can be anywhere from three weeks to three months, whereas a 3-D-printed prototype can be had in as little as two days—no tooling required.
Additionally, there’s rarely one answer to a complex or simple mechanical or design challenge. Engineers and designers willing to forecast multiple potential solutions are achieving a whole new level of efficiency with 3-D printing. Build envelopes on additive manufacturing machines are fairly large, meaning several design solutions can be run simultaneously. Prototyping a number of modifications in a single run isn’t only possible, but preferable, as it can save considerable time and money, and make a super-iterative R&D process affordable. It is estimated 3-D printing will be 50% cheaper and 400% faster within the next five years.
Eliminate design for manufacturability limitations
The single largest obstacle in the continued evolution and advancement of R&D efforts is the concept of “designing for manufacturability.” With traditional manufacturing as the end goal of every product, aesthetic designs and engineering solutions must be fully tested and modified against the limitations of the final production process. For example, for injection-molded pieces, users must dispose of undercuts, include a particular draft on sidewalls and eliminate certain channels because they aren’t possible.
Oftentimes, designs are held back because there’s no way to create certain features on a final production piece, despite excelling in a finite element analysis. Knowing a particular design is the most efficient, but being unable to achieve it, can be incredibly frustrating.
3-D printing today can combine production-quality materials and expansive rapid prototyping methods to create final-use products with far fewer design restrictions. Additive manufacturing machines aren’t constrained by many of the limitations of traditional fabrication. Complex geometries, lattice structures, internal channels with curves and fine details are all possible.
Designing for additive manufacturability eliminates the walls which R&D teams formerly worked, and makes designing for peak efficiency the prime objective. Currently, large final production runs using 3-D printing can be more expensive initially, and can take substantially more time. However, adding efficiency to a part can be worth its weight in gold once the product is to market, and new additive manufacturing technology is on the horizon that will be able to compete with injection molding’s speed.
Develop intelligent functionality
Advanced 3-D printing can sometimes sound like science fiction. Take, for instance, bioprinting, where organs and human tissue are fabricated by leading medical research facilities. Additive manufacturing R&D teams themselves are working with various industry mavericks to push the boundaries of what’s possible.
Multi-material printing, where embedded parts can simply be printed in one step, is the next hurdle the additive manufacturing industry is exploring in earnest. 3-D printing R&D teams have already managed to create airplane wings for drones complete with working circuitry and sensors printed with an aerosol jet system. University and commercial researchers alike are making swift progress on developing inks for printing everything from tiny lithium-ion batteries to antennas and RFID tags.
As R&D engineers well know, some of the best breakthroughs involve simply looking at existing things in a different way. Requiring no new materials and utilizing existing machines, Disney recently released research on using 3-D printing to achieve microstructural designs that express varying flexibility, despite consisting of a single material. They’ve done a finite element analysis on individual areas within a single build to see where the stresses and loads occur and, then, designed each area with uniquely shaped microstructures to exhibit the desired elasticity. Essentially users can create an articulated action figure with both soft and stiff regions and zero mechanical joints—all from a single material and within a single build.
Even as more consumer-scale 3-D printers are used in R&D shops for roughing out initial concepts, modern industrial 3-D printing is challenging long-held beliefs on what’s achievable. R&D teams, working closely with an experienced and knowledgeable additive manufacturing service provider, can embrace and wield novel materials and technologies to not only imagine, but fabricate fresh designs never before possible.
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