April, 2023.- How to make available the knowledge that is generated in universities and study centers for the formation of laws in the country? This is the question behind the Vincula Meeting Platform, a technological product developed by the IMFD Innovation team, as part of the collaboration between the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data (IMFD) and the Vincula collaboration network, led by the Pontificia Universidad Católica and the University of Conception.

“Vincula is a social innovation, whose purpose is that the best and most diverse evidence and knowledge that comes from science and research is used in the process of analysis and creation of laws in our country,” explains Jazmine Maldonado, director from the IMFD Innovation area.

Technically, the platform is integrated with the universities, which make available the information of the scientific publications that are carried out in the country. Legislative system actors who need, for example, the vision of experts in certain subjects, can search this platform for academics whose work can enrich the debate or nurture the process of creating a law.

This is achieved with a web application that allows, through the use of advanced language processing techniques, to detect similarities between scientific research and other texts, which can be searches entered by users or bill documents that are in process. Based on public information available at universities, the system automatically creates anonymous profiles of experts. The academics who register on the platform may use this information as a basis for the creation of their non-anonymized profiles. This information is validated and verified on a monthly basis, in line with Vincula’s member universities and study centers.

Then, the application allows you to search for experts by entering a search phrase, which calculates a score for each academic profile. The first version of this algorithm is based on a BERT multilanguage transformers model that allows to vectorize the text and calculate the similarity between the documents. However, we are implementing a second version that uses the GPT3.5 model to analyze the text and identifies hierarchical knowledge areas that facilitate comparison and allow users to generate much more intuitive profiles. This search system operates on all the academic profiles created, whether they are profiles corresponding to registered users or not. Therefore, when displaying the results on the platform, a specific color code and symbology is used to present the profiles that are still anonymous.

The platform also makes it possible to intuitively review the bills that are being processed, for which it connects to the systems of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies of Chile, which provide updated information on the status of the different bills that are being processed, as well as updated information on those who make up the commissions that process each project and its members.

In relation to bills, the Vincula platform offers different functionalities: it allows you to subscribe to bills of interest and receive updates by email when they change status and progress in their processing. This makes it easier for them to stay informed of the process and to be able to participate in the process in a safe and timely manner, if they wish to do so. They will also be able to see who is part of the legislative commission in which each project is processed and contact the parliamentarians or those who advise them via email.

“The search and recommendation system and the legislative alert are two sides of the same coin. The first is based on demand: it depends on the need and preferences of those who need the knowledge produced in our universities to better understand a topic under discussion, review available options, or assess their impact or relevance. However, it is the Legislative Alert system that allows the Vincula system to be completed by making the window of opportunity visible and available for timely and equitable participation of Chilean academics. Both work in synchrony and allow the final objective of the project to be achieved, which is that the best and most diverse evidence and research knowledge available inform the process of formation of the law for the well-being of Chile and all its inhabitants”, says Francisca Reyes, Director of Vincula, academic at the Institute for Sustainable Development (IDS) of the Catholic University and researcher associated with the Basal CAPES Center and the Millennium Institute of Coastal Socio-Ecology, SECOS.

Academics can provide documentation or report on their participation in commissions where the different bills are discussed, information that is available to other users of the application, both on the page of the bill, and on its website profile.

“Links reflects the collaborative effort of universities to ensure that knowledge can be used in public policies. It involves motivating and training academics to be promoters of the use of their knowledge in parliamentary discussion and, in addition to an effort to coordinate with the internal information systems of the universities for the validation and data extraction systems used by the platform” , points out Andrea Rodriguez-Tastet, Vice Chancellor for Research and Development at the University of Concepción and researcher at the IMFD.

After a 6-month white march, the Vincula Platform began to operate massively in 2023, reaching, in April, a total of 412 users from six universities and Congress. “We hope that, during the second semester of 2023, the Vincula Platform will have new functionalities that will be the result of the research and development that we continue to do and the integration of seven more universities will have been completed”, points out Jazmine Maldonado.

For Marcelo Arenas, academic at the P. Universidad Católica de Chile and director of the IMFD, “interdisciplinary research, carried out jointly by computer science and social science academics, has been very important for the development of the Vincula project, since it has allowed the integration of different approaches and perspectives for the solution of complex problems”. He adds that collaboration between experts in data science, natural language processing, and political science “has enabled the creation of an efficient and accessible platform that can collect, organize, integrate, and link data about academics, and their research, with data of the legislative sphere”

For more information, go to: https://vincula.cl/