The direction of technical change in AI and the trajectory effects of government funding

Government funding of innovation can have a significant impact not only on the rate of technical change, but also on its direction. In this paper, we examine the role that government grants and government departments played in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), an emergent general purpose technology with the potential to revolutionize many aspects of the economy and society. We analyze all AI patents filed at the US Patent and Trademark Office and develop network measures that capture each patent’s influence on all possible sequences of follow-on innovation. By identifying the effect of patents on technological trajectories, we are able to account for the long-term cumulative impact of new knowledge that is not captured by standard patent citation measures. We show that patents funded by government grants, but above all patents filed by federal agencies and state departments, profoundly influenced the development of AI. These long-term effects were especially significant in early phases, and weakened over time as private incentives took over. These results are robust to alternative specifications and controlling for endogeneity

Predicting controlled vocabulary based on text and citations: Case studies in medical subject headings in MEDLINE and patents

This dissertation makes three contributions in the area of controlled vocabulary prediction of Medical Subject Headings. The first contribution is a new partial matching measure based on distributional semantics. The second contribution is a probabilistic model based on text similarity and citations. The third contribution is a case study of cross-domain vocabulary prediction in US Patents. Medical subject headings (MeSH) are an important life sciences controlled vocabulary. They are an ideal ground to study controlled vocabulary prediction due to their complexity, hierarchical nature, and practical significance. The dissertation begins with an updated analysis of human indexing consistency in MEDLINE. This study demonstrates the need for partial matching measures to account for indexing variability. Here, I develop four measures combining the MeSH hierarchy and contextual similarity. These measures provide several new tools for evaluating and diagnosing controlled vocabulary models. Next, a generalized predictive model is introduced. This model uses citations and abstract similarity as inputs to a hybrid KNN classifier. Citations and abstracts are found to be complimentary in that they reliably produce unique and relevant candidate terms. Finally, the predictive model is applied to a corpus of approximately 65,000 biomedical US patents. This case study explores differences in the vocabulary of MEDLINE and patents, as well as the prospect for MeSH prediction to open new scholarly opportunities in economics and health policy research

A deep learning framework for contingent liabilities risk management : predicting Brazilian labor court decisions

Estimar o resultado de um processo em litígio é crucial para muitas organizações. Uma aplicação específica são os "Passivos Contingenciais", que se referem a passivos que podem ou não ocorrer dependendo do resultado de um processo judicial em litígio. A metodologia tradicional para estimar essa probabilidade baseia-se na opinião de um advogado quem determina a possibilidade de um processo judicial ser perdido a partir de uma avaliação quantitativa. Esta tese apresenta a um modelo matemático baseado numa arquitetura de Deep Learning cujo objetivo é estimar a probabilidade de ganho ou perda de um processo de litígio, principalmente para ser utilizada na estimação de Passivos Contingenciais. A arquitetura, diferentemente do método tradicional, oferece um maior grau de confiança ao prever o resultado de um processo legal em termos de probabilidade e com um tempo de processamento de segundos. Além do resultado primário, a arquitetura estima uma amostra dos casos mais semelhantes ao processo estimado, que servem de apoio para a realização de estratégias de litígio. Nossa arquitetura foi testada em duas bases de dados de processos legais: (1) o Tribunal Europeu de Direitos Humanos (ECHR) e (2) o 4º Tribunal Regional do Trabalho brasileiro (4TRT). Ela estimou de acordo com nosso conhecimento, o melhor desempenho já publicado (precisão = 0,906) na base de dados da ECHR, uma coleção amplamente utilizada de processos legais, e é o primeiro trabalho a aplicar essa metodologia em um tribunal de trabalho brasileiro. Os resultados mostram que a arquitetura é uma alternativa adequada a ser utilizada contra o método tradicional de estimação do desfecho de um processo em litígio realizado por advogados. Finalmente, validamos nossos resultados com especialistas que confirmaram as possibilidades promissoras da arquitetura. Assim, nos incentivamos os académicos a continuar desenvolvendo pesquisas sobre modelagem matemática na área jurídica, pois é um tema emergente com um futuro promissor e aos usuários a utilizar ferramentas baseadas como a desenvolvida em nosso trabalho, pois fornecem vantagens substanciais em termos de precisão e velocidade sobre os métodos convencionais.Estimating the likely outcome of a litigation process is crucial for many organizations. A specific application is the “Contingents Liabilities,” which refers to liabilities that may or may not occur depending on the result of a pending litigation process (lawsuit). The traditional methodology for estimating this likelihood is based on the opinion from the lawyer’s experience which is based on a qualitative appreciation. This dissertation presents a mathematical modeling framework based on a Deep Learning architecture that estimates the probability outcome of a litigation process (accepted & not accepted) with a particular use on Contingent Liabilities. The framework offers a degree of confidence by describing how likely an event will occur in terms of probability and provides results in seconds. Besides the primary outcome, it offers a sample of the most similar cases to the estimated lawsuit that serve as support to perform litigation strategies. We tested our framework in two litigation process databases from: (1) the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and (2) the Brazilian 4th regional labor court. Our framework achieved to our knowledge the best-published performance (precision = 0.906) on the ECHR database, a widely used collection of litigation processes, and it is the first to be applied in a Brazilian labor court. Results show that the framework is a suitable alternative to be used against the traditional method of estimating the verdict outcome from a pending litigation performed by lawyers. Finally, we validated our results with experts who confirmed the promising possibilities of the framework. We encourage academics to continue developing research on mathematical modeling in the legal area as it is an emerging topic with a promising future and practitioners to use tools based as the proposed, as they provides substantial advantages in terms of accuracy and speed over conventional methods

On the Origin and Development of the Medical Nutrition Industry

__Abstract__ Product development in the health and life sciences is shifting from the development of target-specific pharmaceutical products to multi-target therapies, including medical nutrition. Medical nutrition consists of nutritional compositions, prescribed by medical professionals for the nutritional support in the dietary management of diseases. The European medical nutrition industry is rapidly maturing, driven by new knowledge on medical nutrition effectiveness and increasing public awareness on its importance. Nevertheless, there are still numerous unmet medical needs that can only be addressed through innovation by the medical nutrition industry. This dissertation describes the innovation dynamics within the European medical nutrition industry, through exploring the origin and development of this industry and all stakeholders involved. The research is multidisciplinary, encompassing scientific, industrial, technological, economic and regulatory disciplines. Although the relatively new and emerging medical nutrition industry offers innovation potential, the results show that a lack of medical nutrition innovation may result in a gloomy future for the medical nutrition industry. The dynamics of the medica