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The Complexaton prize of € 1,000 has been awarded to three PhD-candidates from the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. The Complexaton is a research contest by the Centre for Complex Systems Studies where teams of Master’s students and PhD-candidates work on socially relevant challenges. The winning team of PhD-candidates Methodology and Statistics Qixiang Fang, Sebastian Mildiner Moraga and Mehran Moazeni developed an app that helps to find data for research on the transport of plastic litter in oceans.

The winning team worked on a challenge posed by Erik van Sebille, oceanographer and climate scientist at the Faculty of Science. Van Sebille studies how ocean currents transport plastic litter. The computer simulations of this transport need to be trained with data of observed plastic abundances in the real ocean. But these observations are buried in the scientific literature, and no complete and up-to-date databases exist.

10,000 scientific articles

Contestants Qixiang, Sebastian and Mehran developed an app that uses machine learning to identify the scientific articles with relevant data. “When you search using keywords, you start out with more than 10,000 articles that might contain relevant data”, says Qixiang. “But by feeding this app the choices that Van Sebille and his team make in selecting the articles they need, the software learns how to make a smart selection by itself.”

Connecting and broadening skills

The Complexaton was set up to encourage students to connect with people from other disciplines and broaden their knowledge and skills. “We learned to build a web application, something no one in our team had experience with. And it was nice to work with the colleagues from the Faculty of Science”, says Qixiang. “We had lots of fun and it’s great to win a prize with that!”

Second edition coming up

The Centre for Complex Systems Studies can look back on a successful first edition of the Complexaton. Coordinator Qingyi Feng: “The initial idea of Complexaton was to encourage Master’s students and PhD-candidates to team up and make new accomplishments during the coronavirus pandemic, and we are happy to see that the outcomes were beyond our expectations. The contestants not only set foot in new fields outside of their own studies; the representatives of the challenges also reached out to enthusiastic young researchers from other areas to let them see new possibilities.” Due to the success, a second edition of the Complexaton is already being planned. More information will be provided in October.