AiCE: automating horizon scanning for the detection of emerging technologies

In this paper a tool is presented for the automation of horizon scanning. Horizon scanning is the systematic process of examining the scientific literature to identify opportunities, risks, threats and emerging issues. This tool has been named the Autonomous information Comprehension Engine (AiCE). AiCE has the ability to ingest large quantities of unstructured text based data from a variety of sources, extract a wide variety of features and analyse trends across the corpus of collected source material. AiCE is used to analyse science and technology literature and identify developments which may be of strategic relevance to a specific domain. In this paper AiCE is introduced and its components are outlined. The benefit of the proposed system is demonstrated through a time expenditure study comparing this new system to the traditional manual process of horizon scanning. The proposed system is also demonstrated by analysing literature from the computer vision community to extract relevant research to the natural language processing community.