Quantitative Technology Forecasting: a Review of Trend Extrapolation Methods

Assessing advancements of technology is essential for creating science and technology policies and making informed investments in the technology market. However, current methods primarily focus on the characteristics of the technologies themselves, making it difficult to accurately assess technologies across various fields and generations. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that uses bibliometrics, specifically literature citation networks, to measure chan...

During the 1990s, while exploring the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union on developments in future warfare, a number of authors offered forecasts of military technology appearing by the year 2020. This paper offers a quantitative assessment of the accuracy of this group of forecasts. The overall accuracy - by several measures - was assessed as quite high, thereby pointing to the potential value of such forecasts in managing investments in long-term research and develo...

Deep learning based forecasting methods have become the methods of choice in many applications of time series prediction or forecasting often outperforming other approaches. Consequently, over the last years, these methods are now ubiquitous in large-scale industrial forecasting applications and have consistently ranked among the best entries in forecasting competitions (e.g., M4 and M5). This practical success has further increased the academic interest to understand and imp...

A bibliometric methodology for scanning for emerging science and technology areas is described, where topics in the science, technology and innovation enterprise are discovered using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, their growth rates are modeled using first-order rate kinetics, and research specialization of various entities in these topics is measured using the location quotient. Multiple interactive visualization interfaces that integrate these results together to assist human...

With the advent of Transformative Artificial Intelligence, it is now more important than ever to be able to both measure and forecast the transformative impact/potential of innovation. However, current methods fall short when faced with this task. This paper introduces the Transform-o-meter; a methodology that can be used to achieve the aforementioned goal, and be applied to any innovation, both material and immaterial. While this method can effectively be used for the mentio...

Demand forecasting of hierarchical components is essential in manufacturing. However, its discussion in the machine-learning literature has been limited, and judgemental forecasts remain pervasive in the industry. Demand planners require easy-to-understand tools capable of delivering state-of-the-art results. This work presents an industry case of demand forecasting at one of the largest manufacturers of electronics in the world. It seeks to support practitioners with five co...

We are living in an information era from Twitter to Fitocracy every episode of peoples life is converted to numbers. That abundance of data is also available in information technologies. From Stackoverflow to GitHub many big data sources are available about trends in Information Technologies. The aim of this research is studying information technology trends and compiling useful information about those technologies using big data sources mentioned above. Those collected infor...

Recent years have seen a substantial development of quantitative methods, mostly led by the computer science community with the goal of developing better machine learning applications, mainly focused on predictive modeling. However, economic, management, and technology forecasting research has so far been hesitant to apply predictive modeling techniques and workflows. In this paper, we introduce a machine learning (ML) approach to quantitative analysis geared towards optimizi...

The precise estimation of resource usage is a complex and challenging issue due to the high variability and dimensionality of heterogeneous service types and dynamic workloads. Over the last few years, the prediction of resource usage and traffic has received ample attention from the research community. Many machine learning-based workload forecasting models have been developed by exploiting their computational power and learning capabilities. This paper presents the first sy...

Time series forecasting is one of the most active research topics. Machine learning methods have been increasingly adopted to solve these predictive tasks. However, in a recent work, these were shown to systematically present a lower predictive performance relative to simple statistical methods. In this work, we counter these results. We show that these are only valid under an extremely low sample size. Using a learning curve method, our results suggest that machine learning ...