A tool to map Research &amp; Innovation activities at the European University of Technology EUt+, leveraging open data and natural language processing
Creators: name: Bovenzi, Nicandro
name: Fenge, Janina
name: Fuster, Enric
name: Toietta, Chiara
name: Toury, Timothée
name: Tsapatsoulis, Nicolas
name: Vagliante, Francesco
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: The European University of Technology EUt+ (https://univ-tech.eu/) is a transnational alliance of eight (soon nine) European universities which intends an eventual merger of the member universities and become a single entity. The Alliance members are currently working to set the building blocks for the design and implementation of a common research and innovation (R&amp;I) strategy, backed by common thematic initiatives and support services. In the context of the H2020 project EUt EXTRAS (“EXperimentation to Transform Research Activities and Steering”), a set of data-based tools is being developed in order to: 1) map the joint R&amp;I topics across EUt+ and the collaborations (within the Alliance and with external partners); 2) map the alignment of EUt+ R&amp;I activities with socio-economic challenges and territorial priorities; 3)identify external (current and emerging) research trends. To address the first and, partially, the second point of the list, a so-called EUt+ R&amp;I Mapping Toolkit was designed, after a participative process led by SIRIS Academic (as external consultants) and involving several university stakeholders (vice-presidents for R&amp;I, Heads of Research, research and technology-transfer officers). Importantly, this work, also in line with recent European policies, contributes to nurturing Open Science principles and practices of EUt+, through: - gathering, integrating, and analyzing relevant open data; - fostering exchange of mutual knowledge and collaboration among researchers; - exposing metadata in open format (for transparency and to facilitate reproducibility and replicability of the analysis) - using openly available resources for data processing and information retrieving (to facilitate reproducibility and replicability of the analysis). In this conference venue, a live demo of the explorative platform (https://researchinformation.univ-tech.eu/#/dashboard), a component of the toolkit built to allow external users to directly browse EUt+ R&amp;I activities and discover their thematics, was presented. The platform integrates data from public repositories: European R&amp;I projects from CORDIS, patents from the database of the European Patent Office and scientific publications from OpenAIRE (thanks to the agreement established with OpenAIRE as part of the EUt+ Open Research policy, 80,000 publications, research datasets and other EUt+ research products were made accessible in open format through a single entry point). Additionally, data about national and regional projects was gathered from the eight institutional repositories, and later processed and made openly available for the first time in an integrated manner at EUt+. By means of text mining techniques and open Deep Learning models, a set of "topics" is extracted from the semantic content of the outputs of R&amp;I activities (titles, abstracts, descriptions) and visualized interactively in an environment which is enriched by additional features, such the SDG-filtering based on classification via controlled vocabulary.