Francisco Couto, LASIGE’s integrated member, Diana Sousa and Pedro Ruas, LASIGE’s researchers and Ph.D. students, all members of the DeST project, will take part in the LitCoin NLP Challenge, part of the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) with the partnership of Unicage.

This team has its focus and expertise on several Natural Language Processing tasks, with diverse research conducted in this field applied to bioinformatics and the biomedical domains, and the challenge requires the processing of considerable amounts of data therefore Unicage can be an important asset for an efficient solution.

Unicage is a set of highly efficient commands that have been designed to allow high-speed processing of data whilst maintaining efficient memory and resource management. It is possible then to develop a robust, yet flexible data processing pipeline in a modular way, capable of high performance and efficiency.

The NTL facilitates the use of crowdsourcing to tackle NASA challenges. NASA’s researchers, scientists, and engineers have launched numerous crowdsourcing projects through the NTL, often seeking novel ideas or solutions to accelerate research and development efforts, improve algorithm performance, and seek new ideas and approaches in support of the NASA mission. The NTL offers a variety of open innovation platforms that engage the crowdsourcing community to create the most innovative, efficient, and optimized solutions for specific, real-world problems being faced by NASA and other Federal Agencies.