Marcio de Miranda Santos: Analysing Big Data is important to agree on “starting points” for moving on into the future

Marcio de Miranda Santos, executive director of the Centre for Strategic Studies and Management of Science, Technology and Innovation (CGEE) (Brazil) spoke during his presentation at the international academic conference “Foresight and STI Policy” about the new tools for monitoring and analysing global and national STI trends. The presented tools allow to collect and process large volumes of data, and distribute the results among participants of foresight studies. Some of these tools were designed jointly with the Foresight Centre of the Higher School of Economics.

About the Centre for Strategic Studies and Management of Science, Technology and Innovation

The Centre was established in 2001 as a non-profit organisation, to research factors affecting economic growth, competitiveness, and wellbeing in Brazil. Since its creation, the Centre completed about 400 research projects on STI policy commissioned by the Brazilian government and other organisations including foreign ones. Several projects were implemented jointly with the national Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovations and various public and private research institutes. The Centre employs 90 full-time staff members. To conduct large-scale research, external experts are recruited: on average, up to two thousand people from 300 national and international organisations work on the Centre’s premises in the course of a year.

Why invest in new tools for Big Data analysis?

In the course of several projects, CGEE experts noted that these new tools allow to apply knowledge of top national and international experts, improve the quality of forecasts, keep track of the latest changes in the science and technology field, and generally upgrade the research organisation’s potential. Data collected by monitoring and analysis development trends directly affects the quality, timeliness, and validity of management decisions.

Marcio de Miranda Santos: “At the beginning of practically all studies we’ve seen that all participants appeared to be ready to move on into the future, but were heading in different directions. Having realised how different one person’s vision can be from the starting point and directions envisaged by others, I began to understand just how difficult it is for humankind to move on”.

Figure 1.

Uncertainty is present in any situation; people’s opinions rarely coincide, so it’s very important to correctly estimate where we stand, and give analysts and experts a chance to comment and, possibly, suggest the best possible directions and a starting point for moving on.

To make such an estimate it might be necessary to digest thousands of papers, thousands of kilobytes of data originating from various companies, institutes, journals, and other sources, during a limited period of time. And the data volumes (which may get bigger in the process) must also be structured, presented in a convenient format, and visualised.

The basic platform designed by the CGEE (Figure 2) allows the Centre’s experts to process and extract large volumes of textual information, find similar elements and key aspects, and graphically process the data. In a single taxonomy, the system on average processes 40 thousand texts from different sources. The question of how to organise this data to find out what’s happening now or what is going to happen in the future was actually the reason why CGEE decided to design this information system.

Figure 2.

What the platform is used for: a few examples

CGEE provides support to the Brazilian government in monitoring and assessing implementation of major STI policy initiatives and programmes, and analysing activities of national research networks. Based on the results of such assessment, public funding of research organisations is occasionally adjusted.Using open-source and corporate software and analysing various databases, in particular database of national experts’ resumes (contains about 4.4 million entries), CGEE monitors dynamics of partnerships in Brazilian research networks. Promotion of collaboration based on the Centre’s research resulted in the scientists’ collaboration index growing from 4,5 (in 2001–2007) to 5,2 (in 2008–2013). Analysis of data has also revealed that cutting down public funding among other things results in reduced collaboration index.

The data platform also allows to get an estimate of the international research cooperation. E.g. before coming to Moscow, CGEE researchers tried to find out which Russian scientists and R&D centres cooperate with Brazilian ones in mathematics. In just a few minutes, and at zero cost, the key areas of joint Russian-Brazilian research were identified, the participating teams and organisations.

Brazilian colleagues improved some of the Big Data analysis tools following the joint workshop at HSE, in particular thanks to participation of Maxim Kotsemir who provided CGEE experts with metadata on joint publications by Russian and Brazilian researchers in mathematics indexed by Scopus and Web of Science.

The full text of Marcio de Miranda Santos’s presentation is available here (PDF, 1.96 Mb).

By Elena Gutaruk