Determining the Life Cycle Phase of a Technology Based on Patent Data

Developing new technologies is one of the most important goals of today’s scientific and industrial research. Understanding how technology evolves, as well as its current state, is invaluable in an ecosystem where technology is evolving at an increasingly rapid pace. In this paper, patent data is used to determine a technology’s life cycle. Two patent maps are created, one based on patent citations and one based on keywords. The citation patent map visualizes how patents cite each other, while the keyword patent maps visualize keywords used to describe patents and their relations. Both of these patent maps are dynamic, meaning they change over time thus giving insight into an examined technology’s evolution. A growth analysis of both networks is conducted as well as a degree distribution analysis. Both of these analyses are used to help determine the technology’s lifecycle phase as well as its patterns of growth. This insight is invaluable to stakeholders tasked to make strategic decisions related to technology development

Technology Forecasting of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Technologies through Hierarchical S Curves

This study aims to propose a technology forecasting approach based on hierarchical S-curves. The proposed approach uses holistic forecasting by evaluating the S-curves of sub-technologies as well as the main technology under concern. A case study of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technologies is conducted to demonstrate how the proposed approach works in practice. This is the first study that applies hierarchical S-curves to technology forecasting of unmanned aerial vehicle technologies in the literature. The future trend of the UAV technologies is analysed in detail through a hierarchical S-curve approach. Hierarchical S-curves are also utilised to investigate the sub-technologies of the UAV. In addition, the technology development life cycle of technology is assessed by using the three indexes namely, (1) the current technological maturity ratio (TMR), (2) estimating the number of potential patents that could be granted in the future (PPA), and (3) forecasting the expected remaining life (ERL). The results of this study indicate that the UAV technologies and their sub-technologies are at the growth stage in the technology life cycle, and most of the developments in UAV technology will have been completed by 2048. Hence, these technologies can be considered emerging technologies

ResearchFlow: Understanding the Knowledge Flow between Academia and Industry

Understanding, monitoring, and predicting the flow of knowledge between academia and industry is of critical importance for a variety of stakeholders, including governments, funding bodies, researchers, investors, and companies. To this purpose, we introduce ResearchFlow, an approach that integrates semantic technologies and machine learning to quantifying the diachronic behaviour of research topics across academia and industry. ResearchFlow exploits the novel Academia/Industry DynAmics (AIDA) Knowledge Graph in order to characterize each topic according to the frequency in time of the related i) publications from academia, ii) publications from industry, iii) patents from academia, and iv) patents from industry. This representation is then used to produce several analytics regarding the academia/industry knowledge flow and to forecast the impact of research topics on industry. We applied ResearchFlow to a dataset of 3.5M papers and 2M patents in Computer Science and highlighted several interesting patterns. We found that 89.8% of the topics first emerge in academic publications, which typically precede industrial publications by about 5.6 years and industrial patents by about 6.6 years. However this does not mean that academia always dictates the research agenda. In fact, our analysis also shows that industrial trends tend to influence academia more than academic trends affect industry. We evaluated ResearchFlow on the task of forecasting the impact of research topics on the industrial sector and found that its granular characterization of topics improves significantly the performance with respect to alternative solutions

The analysis and presentation of patents to support engineering design

This paper explores the role of patents in engineering design, and how the extraction and presentation of patent data could be improved for designers. We propose the use of crowdsourcing as a means to post tasks online for a crowd of people to participate and complete. The is-sues of assessment, searching, clustering and knowledge transfer are evaluated with respect to the literature. Opportunities for potential crowd intervention are then discussed, before the presentation of two initial studies. These related to the categorization and interpretation of patents respectively using an online platform. The initial results establish basic crowd capabilities in understanding patent text and interpreting patent drawings. This has shown that reasonable results can be achieved if tasks of appropriate duration and complexity are set, and if test questions are incorporated to ensure a basic level of understanding exists in the workers

Patents in the computer-aided diagnosis industry

Computer aided diagnosis is a relatively new field, through the use of new techniques algorithms and technologies, it can help technicians perform a better and faster analysis, reduce or even substitute part of their workload. Patents are windows into a company's technological assets, as well as into the state of a certain technology field. In this thesis we analyzed patents that are mainly related to the automated analysis of human retinopathies. Using patent search engines we explored the various patent databases, using keywords related to the area and the international patent classification to refine the search and eliminate unrelated results, proceeding then to a thorough analysis of the dataset. By analyzing the structured and unstructured text, contained in the obtained patents, different observations where made: major players in the field,patent timelines, main technologies involved and the direction of the technology evolution

Property management enabled by artificial intelligence post Covid-19: an exploratory review and future propositions

The Covid-19 pandemic outbreak across the globe has disrupted human life and industry. The pandemic has affected every sector, with the real estate sector facing particular challenges. During the pandemic, property management became a crucial task and property managers were challenged to control risks and disruptions faced by their organizations. Recent innovative technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), have supported many sectors through sudden disruptions; this study was performed to examine the role of AI in the real estate and property management (PM) sectors. For this purpose, a systematic literature review was conducted using structural topic modeling and bibliometric analysis. Using appropriate keywords, the researchers found 175 articles on AI and PM research from 1980 to 2021 in the SCOPUS database. A bibliometric analysis was performed to identify research trends. Structural topic modelling (STM) identified ten emerging thematic topics in AI and PM. A comprehensive framework is proposed, and future research directions discussed.publishedVersio

Opportunity Identification for New Product Planning: Ontological Semantic Patent Classification

Intelligence tools have been developed and applied widely in many different areas in engineering, business and management. Many commercialized tools for business intelligence are available in the market. However, no practically useful tools for technology intelligence are available at this time, and very little academic research in technology intelligence methods has been conducted to date. Patent databases are the most important data source for technology intelligence tools, but patents inherently contain unstructured data. Consequently, extracting text data from patent databases, converting that data to meaningful information and generating useful knowledge from this information become complex tasks. These tasks are currently being performed very ineffectively, inefficiently and unreliably by human experts. This deficiency is particularly vexing in product planning, where awareness of market needs and technological capabilities is critical for identifying opportunities for new products and services. Total nescience of the text of patents, as well as inadequate, unreliable and untimely knowledge derived from these patents, may consequently result in missed opportunities that could lead to severe competitive disadvantage and potentially catastrophic loss of revenue. The research performed in this dissertation tries to correct the abovementioned deficiency with an approach called patent mining. The research is conducted at Finex, an iron casting company that produces traditional kitchen skillets. To \u27mine\u27 pertinent patents, experts in new product development at Finex modeled one ontology for the required product features and another for the attributes of requisite metallurgical enabling technologies from which new product opportunities for skillets are identified by applying natural language processing, information retrieval, and machine learning (classification) to the text of patents in the USPTO database. Three main scenarios are examined in my research. Regular classification (RC) relies on keywords that are extracted directly from a group of USPTO patents. Ontological classification (OC) relies on keywords that result from an ontology developed by Finex experts, which is evaluated and improved by a panel of external experts. Ontological semantic classification (OSC) uses these ontological keywords and their synonyms, which are extracted from the WordNet database. For each scenario, I evaluate the performance of three classifiers: k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), random forest, and Support Vector Machine (SVM). My research shows that OSC is the best scenario and SVM is the best classifier for identifying product planning opportunities, because this combination yields the highest score in metrics that are generally used to measure classification performance in machine learning (e.g., ROC-AUC and F-score). My method also significantly outperforms current practice, because I demonstrate in an experiment that neither the experts at Finex nor the panel of external experts are able to search for and judge relevant patents with any degree of effectiveness, efficiency or reliability. This dissertation provides the rudiments of a theoretical foundation for patent mining, which has yielded a machine learning method that is deployed successfully in a new product planning setting (Finex). Further development of this method could make a significant contribution to management practice by identifying opportunities for new product development that have been missed by the approaches that have been deployed to date

AIDA: a Knowledge Graph about Research Dynamics in Academia and Industry

Academia and industry share a complex, multifaceted, and symbiotic relationship. Analysing the knowledge flow between them, understanding which directions have the biggest potential, and discovering the best strategies to harmonise their efforts is a critical task for several stakeholders. Research publications and patents are an ideal medium to analyze this space, but current datasets of scholarly data cannot be used for such a purpose since they lack a high-quality characterization of the relevant research topics and industrial sectors. In this paper, we introduce the Academia/Industry DynAmics (AIDA) Knowledge Graph, which describes 21M publications and 8M patents according to the research topics drawn from the Computer Science Ontology. 5.1M publications and 5.6M patents are further characterized according to the type of the author’s affiliations and 66 industrial sectors from the proposed Industrial Sectors Ontology (INDUSO). AIDA was generated by an automatic pipeline that integrates data from Microsoft Academic Graph, Dimensions, DBpedia, the Computer Science Ontology, and the Global Research Identifier Database. It is publicly available under CC BY 4.0 and can be downloaded as a dump or queried via a triplestore. We evaluated the different parts of the generation pipeline on a manually crafted gold standard yielding competitive results

Application of LF-NMR measurements and supervised learning regression methods for improved characterization of heavy oils and bitumens

This work studies the physicochemical properties of unconventional hydrocarbon resources such as heavy oils and bitumens. The principal methods used in the research consisted of LF-NMR experiments, hypothesis testing, and statistical and data-driven modeling. The research output consists of several machine learning and analytical models capable of predicting heavy oil and bitumen viscosity and core sample water saturation with high accuracy. These results provide a strong case for in-situ LF-NMR applications in well logging

Analyzing Granger causality in climate data with time series classification methods

Attribution studies in climate science aim for scientifically ascertaining the influence of climatic variations on natural or anthropogenic factors. Many of those studies adopt the concept of Granger causality to infer statistical cause-effect relationships, while utilizing traditional autoregressive models. In this article, we investigate the potential of state-of-the-art time series classification techniques to enhance causal inference in climate science. We conduct a comparative experimental study of different types of algorithms on a large test suite that comprises a unique collection of datasets from the area of climate-vegetation dynamics. The results indicate that specialized time series classification methods are able to improve existing inference procedures. Substantial differences are observed among the methods that were tested