Over the past year, we’ve been laying the groundwork for building the research and funding agenda of the Next Generation Internet initiative, the European Commission’s new flagship programme which seeks to build a more inclusive, resilient and democratic future internet by the end of the next decade. As part of this work, we used cutting-edge data-driven methods to map the latest trends in emerging technologies and social issues surrounding the internet. This webinar will showcase the most interesting insights we generated, and guide you through using the methodologies developed DELab (Digital Economy Lab of the University of Warsaw) and Eurecat (Technology Centre of Catalonia), two partners in the EU Engineroom consortium.

When it comes to making decisions about which new technologies or solutions to invest in, where to focus our attention when it comes to future social challenges or other important decisions that require making our own guesses about what the future might hold, we often rely on anecdotal evidence or outdated data, such as company surveys or patent data (often a couple years behind the real trends).

New big data methodologies have made it possible to

use web data sources like Wikipedia, Reddit, Meetup or articles in the tech media, which have proven much better at picking up early signals of change. In this webinar, we will tell you more about how our data science team used, for example, natural language processing, network analysis and machine learning to gather insights about how hacker communities talk about quantum computing, where we find most startups active in the ethical AI  space, or how the media has covered GDPR.

All the methodologies we’ve developed and the underlying data, code and insights are freely available to the public, have a look at our GitHub and Zenodo to learn more. Please also have a look at our interactive results page, which will feature in the webinar.

Participating in this webinar does not assume any prior technical knowledge.