1. General

Category

Category

Other

Please describe Other

Multiple industries

2. Project Details

Company or Institution

World Economic Forum

Project

Strategic Intelligence platform

General description of the AI solution

The World Economic Forum’s Strategic Intelligence platform developed in response to accelerating global complexity, to give users a better sense of the fluid inter-relationships between global issues and help them make more informed decisions

In today’s hyperconnected world, organizations can find it difficult to keep up with the latest trends or make sense of the countless transformations taking place. A systems thinking approach enables us to contextualize the issues shaping the world and make vital connections to understand, adapt, and respond to them.

For example, advancing education to make progress towards SDG 4 requires educators will need to understand the education and skills needed for 21st century curricula, new skills demanded by the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the related transformations taking place in workforce and employment. All of which has been impacted by COVID-19. The World Economic Forum’s Strategic Intelligence platform was developed to respond to such complex and fluid inter-relationships.

The foundation of the platform is its 270+ transformation maps, which depict the most important issues affecting industries, economies, global issues and the SDGs, and situate each topic within a dynamic system of inter-relationships. The platform uses experts from the Forum’s network of universities, think-tanks, international organizations and other research institutions around the world to highlight the context and implications of the key drivers of transformation for each issue. This is augmented with machine intelligence that analyses and sorts the latest research and analysis from more than 300 trusted global sources. Because the transformation maps are interlinked, they enable users to understand each topic from multiple perspectives and track the dynamic interdependencies between them.

Website

https://intelligence.weforum.org/

Organisation

World Economic Forum

3. Aspects

Excellence and Scientific Quality: Please detail the improvements made by the nominee or the nominees’ team or yourself if your applying for the award, and why they have been a success.

Strategic Intelligence uses patent pending semantic fingerprinting techniques based on graph embedding in deep neural architectures for knowledge mapping, aggregation, and prediction. These models are employed to automatically curate knowledge and evolve our knowledge graph to better represent the real world.

In addition, our novel Signals processing technology can automatically extract forecasts, opportunities, risks, statistics and investments from an amalgamation of sources including news articles, scientific publications and transcripts. The engine is powered by the latest advances in semantic inference including deep transformers, contextually aware convolutional neural networks, and a quality assurance ensemble of textual classifiers.

Finally, the Monitor feature in Strategic Intelligence uses hierarchical clustering techniques in conjunction with machine generated heuristics to automatically cluster, summarise and re-headline groups of related content including articles and video.

Research on Semantic fingerprinting has been fully documented as part of our patent application. Research on our Signals technology has been documented in the form of a scientific paper which we are planning to submit shortly to a number of upcoming artificial intelligence conferences.

Status of technology: Patent pending / conference submission stage. Live on intelligence.weforum.org and in our app Strategic IQ.

Scaling of impact to SDGs: Please detail how many citizens/communities and/or researchers/businesses this has had or can have a positive impact on, including particular groups where applicable and to what extent.

The proposal offers access to a platform that provides expert insight, briefings data, and research on each of the SDGs and all of their associated issues. Since the platform systemically maps each SDG and associated topics – such as climate change, inequality and sustainable development it allows users to interactively navigate and understand the systems in which SDGs operate so as to address and respond to the challenges and opportunities posed by them.

The content and knowledge on the platform is freely available to anyone as a Global Public Good and the advanced features are also available to all UN employees globally. This tool is being used by international organisations and public sector/ ministry officials to build capacity for SDG s and avoid blind spots they may encounter when policy making, it helps crate frameworks to design solutions to tackle SDGs. This means the use of the platform to research, understand, benchmark and operationalise SDG solutions is available in an unlimited way and scalability to millions of citizens/communities and/or researchers/businesses is possible. Currently the platform has over 500,000 users.

It is expected that the project can increase the impact of AI in the SDG field but providing an example of what AI can do to distil the most important issues related to SDGs and automatically provide associated key insights

Scaling of AI solution: Please detail what proof of concept or implementations can you show now in terms of its efficacy and how the solution can be scaled to provide a global impact ad how realistic that scaling is.

Currently the platform has been used by the UNDP Accelerator Labs in their report on the “Changing Nature of Work, the authors noted ““The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Strategic Intelligence Tool allowed us to explore and monitor the global issues and forces driving transformational change across economies and industries. It allowed us to create customized maps to navigate the most relevant issues and publications on the topic. We are grateful to World Economic Forum for making their online strategic intelligence tool available to us.". It has also been a resource for other international organisations in their briefing and speaking notes research.

In terms of scalability – the content and knowledge on the platform is freely available to anyone with a simple sign-up process to the site, it is a Global Public Good offered by the Forum and the advanced features are also available to all UN employees globally. This means the use of the platform to research, understand, benchmark and operationalise SDG solutions is available in an unlimited way and scalability to millions of citizens/communities and/or researchers/businesses is possible. Currently the platform has over 500,000 users.

The maps and content on the platform can be shared widely across the globe to enable the network affect, in the UN system the maps can be downloaded and shared with colleagues.

The tool Is being used by multiple academic institutions to design curricula and introduce AI into the curricula and tach students how to use it and how it works

Ethical aspect: Please detail the way the solution addresses any of the main ethical aspects, including trustworthiness, bias, gender issues, etc.

The application is equitable in that no person is unable to access it and use it so long as they are able to access the internet. It is lawful and complies with all legal rules and regulations, it is robust, well established and well tested.

In recognition of the fact that in the developing world, access to the internet is predominantly conducted through mobile phones, the platform is available in app form as well to increase inclusivity.

The knowledge sourced and featured on the platform is not only from global knowledge institutions but also local and grass-roots knowledge institutions to support knowledge equality and symmetry. For example, the platform works with a consortium of think tanks which are primarily based out of the global south and engage them to ensure grass-roots and local voices are featured alongside global think tanks to allow for holistic, global and local, information on the topics featured.

It is inclusive in that the experts and contributors to insight, knowledge, publications, and data are diverse and sourced from all over the world, in different regions and languages. The platform is dynamic, so it is consistently growing and updating these resources and changing them to reflect different views. The platform is currently available in 10 languages