Mapping funding activityTristan Maillard, SNSF

SNSF Research creates knowledge.

Portfolio Analysis of a funding agency

•SNSF is Switzerland’s most important funding agency

•Mainly bottom up research funding

•Multi-disciplinary research funded: from humanities to life sciences.

•Proposal in 3 different languages.

•Open questions ( policy/decision making )

•Does the SNSF discriminate some research fields?

•Is there research fields that does not apply to the SNSF for funding?

•How do I find the most adequate referees?

•Methodology

•Modeling semantic information of 30k proposals and 100k publications

•Explore data through visualization technics.

SNSF Research creates knowledge.

Portfolio Analysis: challenges

Methodological challenges

• Going beyond co-citations ( different cultures of citations, database issues )

• Risks of over-interpretation:

A visualization is not an explanation.

Modeling is not reality!

Semantic challenges

• Multi-lingual proposals ( French, German, English )

• Find the right database to define research activity. Limitations of WoK, Scopus

• Supervised vs non-supervised methods

Mapping challenges

• The dataviz must be useful : it must depend on the question asked.

• Interactive visualisation: performance on large datasets.

SNSF Research creates knowledge.

Me, myself and I

Background in theoretical physics

Marie Curie Fellow on String Theory modeling

Quit research for administration

Science administration

Head of unit science coordination

Data mining for decision making and policy