The landscape of science and technology is characterized by its dynamic and evolving nature, constantly reshaped by new discoveries, innovations, and paradigm shifts. Moreover, science is undergoing a remarkable shift towards increasing interdisciplinary collaboration, where the convergence of diverse fields fosters innovative solutions to complex problems. Detecting emerging scientific topics is paramount as it enables industries, policymakers, and innovators to adapt their strategies, investments, and regulations proactively. As the common approach for detecting emerging technologies, despite being useful, bibliometric analyses may suffer from oversimplification and/or misinterpretation of complex interdisciplinary trends. In addition, relying solely on domain experts to pinpoint emerging technologies from science and technology trends might restrict the ability to systematically analyze extensive information and introduce subjective judgments into the interpretations. To overcome these drawbacks, in this work, we present an automated artificial intelligence-enabled framework, called WISDOM, for detecting emerging research themes using advanced topic modeling and weak signal analysis. The proposed approach can assist strategic planners and domain experts in more effectively recognizing and tracking trends related to emerging topics by swiftly processing and analyzing vast volumes of data, uncovering hidden cross-disciplinary patterns, and offering unbiased insights, thereby enhancing the efficiency and objectivity of the detection process. As the case technology, we assess WISDOM's performance in identifying emerging research as well as their trends, in the field of underwater sensing technologies using scientific papers published between 2004 and 2021.

翻译：科学与技术领域具有动态演变的特征，不断被新发现、创新和范式转移所重塑。此外，科学正经历着向日益增长的跨学科合作的显著转变，不同领域的融合为复杂问题提供了创新解决方案。检测新兴科学主题至关重要，因为它使行业、政策制定者和创新者能够主动调整其战略、投资和法规。作为检测新兴技术的常用方法，文献计量分析尽管有用，但可能对复杂的跨学科趋势存在过度简化或误解。此外，仅依赖领域专家从科技趋势中识别新兴技术，可能会限制系统分析海量信息的能力，并将主观判断引入解释中。为克服这些缺点，本研究提出了一种名为WISDOM的自动化人工智能框架，利用高级主题建模和弱信号分析来检测新兴研究主题。该方法通过快速处理和分析大量数据、揭示隐藏的跨学科模式并提供无偏见的见解，能够协助战略规划者和领域专家更有效地识别和跟踪与新兴主题相关的趋势，从而提高检测过程的效率和客观性。作为案例技术，我们使用2004年至2021年间发表的科学论文，评估了WISDOM在水下传感技术领域识别新兴研究及其趋势的性能。