“AI in manufacturing” resonating in the academia

Where does the topic of “artificial intelligence in manufacturing” dominate in research papers, and which subtopics are most prevalent in the EU and Japan? These questions are answered with the help of the Microsoft Academic Graph, a knowledge database of scientific publication records within the EU-Japan.AI project.

Microsoft Academic Graph in a nutshell

The Microsoft Academic Graph is a knowledge base that contains records of academic publications, citation relationships between those publications, as well as authors, institutions, journals, conferences, and fields of study. The data on each entity type is extensive, and the entire database contains information on tens of millions of publications and authors, hundreds of thousands of institutions, and tens of thousands of journals and conferences going back decades.

“AI in manufacturing” in research papers

The analysis shows that the number of research papers in the field of “AI in manufacturing” has been steadily increasing across all countries. Japan comparatively publishes on the level of top EU countries with only the UK and Germany having a greater volume of publication.

Subtopics addressed in research papers

Overall, the field of computer science has the strongest growth rates in all countries. However, there are significant differences between countries in terms of research focus. Japan publishes the most papers on robotics and has seen a steep increase in volume since the early 1990s. In the field of the Internet of Things (IoT), Italy publishes the most, followed only by the United Kingdom.

On the other hand, if we look at publications on agriculture, we see a very different distribution. Several European countries seem to focus their research more on this industry than Japan. This is to be expected, as these industries are more important for some countries (e.g. they account for a larger share of GDP) than for others.

Germany publishes the most in the field of the automotive industry, surpassing other countries by an order of magnitude.

For more information, we encourage the readers to visit the AI Observatory https://eujapan.ijs.si/dashboards/Main/Index?visualization=visualizations-news#  as the charts and observatory are interactive. For final results, follow the EU-Japan project at https://project.eu-japan.ai/  and our social media.