It’s like having a whole new research partner…

Orbital, as you know, has many cool features in the pipeline which are designed to make research easier. From keeping tabs on your data and helping you find what you’re looking for through to helping you build your data management plan Orbital is going to be an essential tool in your daily research work. Today we’re pleased to announce that it’s being made even better, making use of some really rather clever machine learning and artificial intelligence to actually do parts of the research for you.

To start with, all you need to do is to upload your research data in whatever format you’ve got it in. If you don’t have research data then just give Orbital a few keywords and it’ll generate research data for you based on over 200 individual variables gathered from (amongst other things) the news, weather, stock markets and punctuality of the rail network. Once your data is loaded Orbital will begin to sift through it, sorting it into a more easily understood form which can be searched and queried with ease. From there Orbital will begin to look for statistically significant patterns of data, pick them out for further analysis and finally output a conclusion for you – complete with any necessary citations – ready for inclusion in your paper.

Yet another example of how Orbital isn’t just a place to keep your data, but an active part of your day-to-day work.