Visualisations of key emerging technologies and social issues II

Our daily lives are disrupted by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In the spirit of the ongoing challenges, our team has been monitoring the tech world to gather and organise insights on the most relevant trends. Equipped with various text-mining tools, we have been trying to make sense of the information maze surrounding us. 

This report aims to summarise our conclusions from analysing the most important developments in two time periods: the years 2016 to 2020, and the six months between January and June 2020. By dividing our analysis into two parts, we can focus more on the long-term challenges, and also better understand the current crisis. 

In the first part of the study, we continue the multi-stage topic identification process used in our previous research deliverables. We examine trends in news articles and prepare deep dives for 8 key NGI topics:

● Trustworthy Information

● Blockchain and cryptocurrencies

● Online Privacy

● Sustainability and Climate Crisis

● Safer Online Environments

● Democracy

● Market Competition

● Ethical AI

In the second section, we focus on the COVID-19 crisis. We analyse trends in tech news, open-source projects on GitHub and Reddit discussions. Since April 2020, we have regularly released new insights in an online presentation. In the report, we summarise key conclusions based on up to date data.