In a first-of-its-kind study, Elsevier has provided comprehensive analysis of the global research landscape and future trends in Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Share on X

The report’s data shows how China is set to become the global leader in AI research, having already overtaken the U.S. in 2004 and fast closing in on Europe’s lead in that arena. At this rate, the report predicts that the country will become the biggest source of AI research globally within four years.

The report predicts that China will become the biggest source of AI research globally within the next four years
Share on X

Key findings from the report include:

• Europe is suffering from AI Brain Drain: Over the 20 year period, Europe has been losing academic talent in this area, mostly to the corporate sector in the United States.
• Globally, research in AI has grown by 12.9% annually over the last 5 years
• There have been several key milestones over 20 years which have led to spikes and growth in AI research
• The ethics of AI is a research blind spot. Despite the increasing societal relevance of AI and widespread media attention on ethical implications, research remains limited.

The Elsevier analysis finds that industry in the United States attracts the most AI talent from both local and international academia
Share on X

The report shows that, globally, AI research has accelerated, growing by more than 12 percent annually in the past five years (2013-2017), compared to less than 5 percent in the previous 5 years (2008-2012). By contrast, research output overall, globally across all subject areas, has grown by 0.8 percent annually over the past five years (2013-2017).

Enrico Motta, Professor of Knowledge Technologies at the Open University in the UK, was one of the many experts who contributed to the report. He believes it is the most comprehensive characterization of AI outputs across different sectors delivered so far: “This report applies extensive text mining and semantic analytics across literature from different sectors to uncover how to more comprehensively define the AI field – essentially using AI to map AI,” he adds.

Reviewing 600 documents and over 700 field-specific key words across four sectors – research, education, technology, and media – the semantic analysis reveals that the field of AI focuses on seven distinct research areas:

• Search and Optimization,
• Fuzzy Systems,
• Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Representation,
• Computer Vision,
• Machine Learning and Probabilistic Reasoning,
• Planning and Decision Making, and
• Neural Networks.

Globally, AI research has accelerated, growing by more than 12 percent annually in the past five years
Share on X

Of these areas, research in Machine Learning and Probabilistic Reasoning, Neural Networks, and Computer Vision show the largest volume of research output and growth.

Keyword clusters and co-occurrences in the AI field, 2017; source: Scopus

Machine Learning and Probabilistic Reasoning, Neural Networks, and Computer Vision show the largest volume of research output and growth
Share on X

Regional findings highlighted in the report:

• In terms of research areas within the field of AI, Europe is the largest and most diverse region with high levels of international collaboration
• After China and the US, India became the third largest country in terms of AI research output, followed by Germany and Japan.
• Iran is ninth in AI publication output, on par with France and Canada.
• International mobility and collaboration patterns suggest that China operates in relative isolation from the wider research community.

“With this comprehensive study of research performance in AI we aim to provide insights into the field’s dynamics, trends and parameters, says Dan Olley, Chief Technology Officer at Elsevier. “The report is not a conclusion, but the start of a discussion on how we best enter the era of AI and increasingly symbiotic technology,” he concludes.

Data used in the report comes from Elsevier’s Scopus, Fingerprint Engine, PlumX, ScienceDirect, and SciVal, RELX’s TotalPatent, and further draws on public sources, including dblp, arXiv, Stanford AI Index, kamishima.net, and Kaggle, as well as datasets provided by the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Science.

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Report: Global AI Research appeared first on Tech Trends.

Will we see a gold rush in the publishing industry as major players move to invest in Immersive Technologies?

Mark Christian’s job title is rather unique for his industry –Global Director of Immersive Learning – but when I met him at Pearson’s central London office he seemed somewhat bewildered by that: “I’ve actually challenged my competitors to show me where my peer is in their companies, but I don’t see them yet,” he tells me.

Immersive technologies are set to play a key role in modernizing our education, allowing legacy systems to finally move away from models that date back to the 1800s into something more suited for the digital age.

Immersive technologies are set to play a key role in modernizing our education, allowing legacy systems to finally move away from models that date back to the 1800s
Share on X

Given the considerable hype that has been building up around Virtual and Augmented Reality, you might expect more publishers to have dedicated resources to these technologies, whereas the reality is that much of what we’ve seen so far has been limited to variations of Augmented Reality books. While that type of content does fall under Christian’s remit, however, he is rather cautious about their long-term future.

“As this technology becomes more ubiquitous, a little pop-up thing in a text book is going to be very uninteresting to a student in five years time,” he says. “They might increase engagement and profits by a measure, but I think we need to focus on solving real problems in education, and to do that you need to look ahead.”

Japhet Asher, Digital Director at Carlton Books agrees that Publishing is still a relatively conservative business, but warns against dismissing AR books as mere gimmicks. His company has sold close to four million such books in over thirty countries, and he argues that as stories continue to evolve consumers will always want to engage with them.

“If used well it’s a way to tell new stories and deliver fresh experiences. We’ll keep reinventing the book – we’re not looking to replace it. While much of the current focus with AR is on Apple’s ARKit and its triggerless AR, we are very keen to explore deeper with AR triggered by the page. We think this allows us to deliver the best of digital, while preserving what’s brilliant about the oldest content delivery system of all.”

it makes strategic sense that Pearson has partnered with Microsoft to develop content for the HoloLens
Share on X

Yet Christian compares the current moment in immersive technology to where the mobile market was ten years ago: “How many companies (and I include Pearson in that) just missed that? They would look at their phones and wonder ‘who would want their textbook in one of these? Who’s going to read the news on this?’ And a lot of companies are still playing catch-up retro-fitting their platforms around that, still wrapping their heads around designing for mobile. Are you kidding me? That ship has sailed! If you are looking at the future, it’s right here. A HoloLens is staring you in the eye.”

So it makes strategic sense that Pearson has partnered with Microsoft to develop content for the HoloLens, and last month at Bett they announced that it would be expanding this to providing school modules in its Windows Mixed Reality headsets later this year. The first five applications – in the form of licenced bundles – are already being sold to schools all over the world for the 2018-19 back to school season.

These applications enable collaborative, teacher-led experiences where we network the HoloLens together so students see the same thing in the same place
Share on X

One of the Pearson applications I demoed showed was called Holopatient. This is a training tool for nursing students which allows them to interact with holographic patients and experience common medical scenarios they might not otherwise be exposed to. “Lots of people go into anaphylactic shock,” explains Christian, but would a student nurse on a ward get to see a patient going into anaphylactic shock? Not necessarily.”

These applications enable collaborative, teacher-led experiences where we network the HoloLens together so students see the same thing in the same place, and teachers can create content and lead their class through it in the way that makes the most sense.

The idea is to use Mixed Reality to support schools, learners and teachers in doing things in cheaper, better, and more scalable way
Share on X

The idea, says Christian, is to support schools, learners and teachers in doing things in cheaper, better, and more scalable way. Buying a few HoloLens devices – even at $3000 apiece – becomes good value when compared to traditional actor-led setups.

 

“Although there is no reason why this couldn’t sit alongside any of our products – or any number of our competitor’s products for that matter – this is not not e-learning, it’s not courseware. This is a piece of SIM software,” Christian explains.

Which is not to say Pearson are not doing e-learning too; the company has rolled out one of the largest repositories of interactive 360 educational video, with over 70 experiences so far. “This is where it sits within a Pearson product. It’s courseware that you can interact with either on a PC, or stick it on a Google cardboard and in there you’d have hotspots where you can find out more about certain elements, or control where you go within the experience. To be able to take a history student and say we’re going to put you in the middle of the battle of Gettysburg, that’s powerful. It gives you a distinct advantage over a content provider offering more traditional multimedia content such as animations or video.”

Christian is in fact betting on this 360 content to yield significant ROI within a relatively short time. Although he wouldn’t share exact figures, he says Pearson’s market research has been hugely encouraging in that regard: “I think people are going to be amazed by the results. It’s going to be huge.”

We’re a publisher, and so traditionally what do publishers do? They take other people’s IP, publish and distribute it widely. I think in the digital era many publishers have forgotten that. We can be a platform, be a route to market, be a salesforce. What we’re doing with our portfolio is a mix of all that so we’re partnering with the right companies and bringing them in, but we’re building our own stuff where it makes sense too.”

There is some indication that other publishers are starting to take notice of the huge potential of Mixed Reality for their business
Share on X

There is some indication that other publishers are starting to take notice of this huge potential as well. One example is Axel Springer Digital Ventures recently announcing that they would be investing an undisclosed amount in Magic Leap. The secretive Florida-based Mixed Reality company – which has so far raised nearly $2 billion from Google, Alibaba, Warner Bros, Qualcomm and others – has released very few details about its Magic Leap One device, which is expected to ship to developers at some point in 2018.

“Axel Springer will, with investments in companies like Magic Leap, actively participate in innovative technologies,” their press statement read. Yet people like Christian are somewhat sceptical of the buy-in approach: “ Until you start doing stuff and building and bringing it to market, you’re not in the game,” he says, adding that although it’s early days for the technology, it is the ones that get into it early who will benefit the most. “By the time the content becomes mainstream, that ship will have sailed and the publishers who haven’t done that, they’ll notice it. And it’s all going to happen very quickly.”

This disrupt-or-be-disrupted scenario is something that I experienced back 2013 when working for Mendeley. The London start-up was acquired by the world’s largest scientific publisher, Elsevier, who were keen to incorporate the company’s innovative product and ethos into its own strategy. Mendeley’s Co-founder Jan Reichert, who eventually left the company to start a new venture – Kopernio, an AI-powered platform enabling researchers to access scholarly articles more efficiently – says there is an on-going trend in academic and scientific publishing to invest in technologies such as AI and Machine learning, and it also makes sense that immersive technologies will eventually follow a similar path.

 

“Within a couple of years you’ll probably start seeing deals made for around the 100 million mark, and publishers will probably be the natural purchasers for that,” adds Christian. “I think publishers will play a really important role here if they want to, and the ones that don’t will be really disappointed.”

Lots of publishers are talking about immersive technology (AR, VR, mixed reality etc) – but which ones are actually investing in it, and why? https://t.co/6x6ffdbAvG pic.twitter.com/U6vdVEZ840

— FutureBook (@TheFutureBook) March 5, 2018

This article was originally published on The Bookseller’s FutureBook

Tech Trends’  Virtual Reality Consultancy services offers support for companies looking to get a foothold in the growing Mixed Reality spectrum and enhance their brand strategy with immersive technologies. 

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter

The post Are Publishers Ready to go Virtual? appeared first on Tech Trends.

Academia.edu was founded in 2008 with the mission of making knowledge more accessible and fostering discussion amongst scholars.

10 years later the platform hosts over 12 million Open Access papers and has a global community of more than 35 million registered users.

There are a lot of different types of academic output, but there’s no real incentive to share those
Share on X

Last week we stopped by their offices in San Francisco to talk to CEO and Founder Richard Price about what’s next for them, and where they see the future of academic research and education going.

“We eventually want to see all research being made freely available,” says Price. That’s an estimated 65 million papers, so he admits there’s still a way to go. The other part of his mission is to foster meaningful discussions around those papers.

Many people don’t actually read the papers they cite, so citations are not always an accurate measure of impact
Share on X

The challenge for academic social networks such as Academia.edu and its main competitors — ResearchGate and Mendeley — has always been to foster these broader conversations outside the pre-existing boundaries of departments and institutions. Academia tends to be insular and scholars are justifiably protective of their research, which can hinder openness and collaboration. Arguably, however, the next generation of researchers, having grown up in a world of social media and pervasive sharing, will find this much more natural.

The next generation of researchers growing up with social media might find sharing much more natural
Share on X

One of the features they are piloting to encourage these exchanges is called Sessions, where users can upload a draft version of their paper and invite others to discuss it within a closed group for a period of 20 days. There are about 6000 sessions happening at any one time within the site, some with as many as 1000 members (although the average group size is around 50).

“The other tool we’ve developed allows a subset of authoritative users to review papers and recommend them as valid contributions to their field of research. “Currently this is limited to a very small group of users (less than .1%), who must have a PhD and have been published, plus have experience of the peer-review process, but we are looking at expanding that pool.”

The measure of importance of an academic paper is usually tied to the number of times it gets cited, the so-called “Impact Factor”, yet price believes that platforms such as Academia.edu will allow for more granular assessment of the real-world impact that research has. It’s a complex matter, because even citations can fail to give you an accurate picture of the credibility of a particular paper, as many people don’t actually read the papers they cite.

“We need to get a lot better at asking — and answering — the question of what do academics actually think about this paper,” says Price. “I’m a huge believer in Altmetrics, and think the new measures of impact such as Author Rank and Paper Rank will become a lot more important in years to come.”

Part of that means moving beyond the PDF as the standard unit of scholarly output. There are a lot of different types of files that get produced, such as data-sets, code, blog posts, etc. Yet there is no real incentive for sharing these As we move beyond the impact factor we will get a lot more granularity and that will help paint a bigger and more accurate picture of what knowledge is relevant and credible, and to better connect people with the knowledge they need.

We don’t know how big the market is, because academic papers haven’t been openly accessible before
Share on X

The company so far raised around $17 Million and is working on ways to monetize some of its features while keeping the core platform and its content free. Yet the size of its potential user-base is actually hard to estimate, since its appeal extends beyond the traditional scholarly community.

“Only about half of our users are academics per se. The rest are teachers, diplomats, accountants, lawyers… We have investment bankers and African farmers coming to the site for the most diverse reasons, it’s really for anybody with an interest in academic research, and we don’t know how big that market is, because papers haven’t been Open Access on this scale before.”

Some of the specific use cases he mentions include a teacher using papers to support an argument for adopting a different methodology in the classroom, or a farmer looking at increasing their yield by learning about new variety of maize. And he shows me a quote that illustrates what impact this access to knowledge can have in people’s lives:

“May Allah bless you as long as the East Wind blows and shakes the branches in the distant meadows,” reads the lyric message from a grateful user in Singapore. “What you have created in academia.edu is arguably the best tool for scholars and academics. I pray to God that he provides you with all the wealth and knowledge necessary for you to keep doing what you are doing. A thousand thanks and gratitude.”

In a few years, Price hopes that all new papers published will be open and freely available so that anyone with an Internet connection can read them.

“When I was at school I only used the occasional basic AltaVista search, but in future I see a world where a kid in China interested in lithium ion batteries can find the latest research published on that subject, read it on her mobile translated automatically into Mandarin, and be able to see which of those papers are ranked as most relevant by people respected in that field, so that she instantly knows what’s most relevant to her. That’s what I want Academia.edu to make possible.”

In a few years, Price hopes that all new papers published will be open and freely available so that anyone with an Internet connection can read them
Share on X

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Sharing Knowledge Beyond the Ivory Tower appeared first on Tech Trends.