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DSI Infrastructures & Labs are shareable infrastructures or structural vessels for creating collaborative research environments related to digital transformation. Prof. Dr. Jürgen Bernard briefly introduces the SDG Research Scout, one of the projects in this series.
What is the SDG Research Scout?
The aim of the SDG Research Scout project is to analyze research articles from the University of Zurich (UZH) with regard to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations and to enable a scalable assignment of the articles with regard to their contribution to sustainability. The SDG Research Scout is a pilot model for new forms of dialog between humans and AI, tested using the practical example of sustainability. A new interactive and visual web system will offer users flexible access to SDG-relevant publications from UZH.
Which work steps are automated with the SDG Research Scout?
We pursue a human-in-the-loop approach: important intellectual decisions in the process are controlled and influenced by users, while the AI takes over the laborious work steps. We understand the SDG Research Scout as a medium of dialog between humans and AI, in an iterative and incremental process of machine learning. This process is based on contributions from the ZORA database, an exciting document space that can be explored interactively. In addition, the process includes Natural Language Processing (NLP) for text analysis, AI suggestions for the sustainability classification of publications, explanations of classifications (explainable AI) and the validation and improvement (labeling) of automatic classifications by humans.
Who is the target group and how do they benefit from the SDG Research Scout?
Researchers receive an interactive visual exploration system for over one hundred thousand UZH publications, with new perspectives on the research landscape and opportunities to discover scientific contributions from colleagues. In addition, researchers gain valuable insights into sustainability contributions through SDG exploration: own contributions, as well as contributions from UZH in general, invite reflection and help to set new sustainability priorities. The UZH sustainability team can look forward to a web-based, interactive labeling and classification system for sustainability goals. This will create a scalable gold standard for SDG-labeled research articles, with a drastic increase in efficiency.
Learn more about the SDG Research Scout here.
All projects of the series «DSI Infrastructures & Labs» can be found here.
Jürgen Bernard is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Zurich (UZH). He is leading the Interactive Visual Data Analysis (IVDA) Group. He is affiliated with the Digital Society Initiative (DSI), the interdisciplinary and cross-faculty research initiative of the UZH.
