Spotted: Although it’s difficult to ascertain due to the sheer volume of publishing channels, experts estimate that around two million scholarly articles are published each year. Staying up to date with research in a certain field is such a big undertaking that scientists are never able to read all the papers relevant to their work. Artificial intelligence (AI), however, can read much, much more content than a human. 

New platform ScoutinScience is putting the volume of information that AI can process to use as a way to identify scientific work that is relevant to a particular organisation, identifying studies with the most potential for commercial technological applications. Using natural language processing techniques, the company’s ‘GreatAI’ platform gathers, processes, and reviews scientific publications from a range of publishers, both public and private. The ensuing report provides a Business Potential Score that ranks the research’s tech-transfer potential.  

GreatAI connects with other databases outside the field of publishing as a means of contextualising research. The additional analysis helps situate the data within bigger picture industry trends, and ScoutinScience emphasises the understandability of its dashboards – making science easy to understand means it’s easier to spot and create opportunities for development and use.  

Using technology to make knowledge more accessible is an exciting development that Springwise is spotting in a variety of areas, including bringing digital literacy into the teaching of traditional educational subjects and using VR to teach methods for combatting discrimination.

Written By: Keely Khoury