Dirk Thorleuchter

• Dr.
• Fraunhofer Institute for Technological Trend Analysis

Over the last 40 years, the verification of compliance with disarmament treaties for Weapons of Mass Destruction has steadily evolved using several technological solutions. Today’s technological progress promises a variety of possible future and emerging technologies that may contribute to even better verification techniques. However, the latter mi...

The following is a list of the Grand Defense-Technological Challenges for Europe post-2020 from the point of view of Fraunhofer VVS. As mentioned before, these challenges should be further developed and specified to extract concrete research topics. Research activities addressing these challenges need to include investigations into their ethical, l...

We investigate the identification and analysis of linguistic (lexico-grammatical) features that are characteristically used by articles of a specific year of publication. Linguistic features differ from shallow features because they represent authors' lexico-grammatical writing styles and do not consider well-known bag-of-words model. Current liter...

Hadiths are important textual sources of law, tradition, and teaching in the Islamic world. Analyzing the unique linguistic features of Hadiths (e.g. ancient Arabic language and story-like text) results to compile and utilize specific natural language processing methods. In the literature, no study is solely focused on Hadith from artificial intell...

Literature shows interdisciplinary research as an essential driver for innovation. Ideas that are used as a starting point for this research are of an interdisciplinary nature because they combine aspects from different disciplines. The identification of interdisciplinary ideas at an early stage enables the start of interdisciplinary research and t...

Qualifying prospects as leads to contact is a complex exercise. Sales representatives often do not have the time or resources to rationally select the best leads to call. As a result, they rely on gut feeling and arbitrary rules to qualify leads. Model-based decision support systems make this process less subjective. Standard input for such an auto...

We investigate the impact of idea mining filtering on web-based weak signal detection to improve strategic decision making. Existing approaches for identifying weak signals in strategic decision making use environmental scanning procedures based on standard filtering algorithms. These algorithms discard patterns with low information content; howeve...

In recent years, social networks, microblogs, and short message service have deeply penetrated peoples lives, and thus, chat-style text is a common phenomenon. This chat-style text has many unknown features for linguists, which can be discovered by analyzing a chat-style corpus. The process of constructing a corpus conforms to specific corpus crite...

The weak signal concept according to Ansoff has the aim to advance strategic early warning. It enables to predict the appearance of events in advance that are relevant for an organization. An example is to predict the appearance of a new and relevant technology for a research organization. Existing approaches detect weak signals based on an environ...

The aim of cross impact analysis (CIA) is to predict the impact of a first event on a second. For organization’s strategic planning, it is helpful to identify the impacts among organization’s internal events and to compare these impacts to the corresponding impacts of external events from organization’s competitors. For this, literature has introdu...

This research creates an architecture for investigating the existence of probable lexical divergences between articles, categorized as Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and non-ISI, and consequently, if such a difference is discovered, to propose the best available classification method. Based on a collection of ISI- and non-ISI-indexed ar...

Cross impact analysis (CIA) consists of a set of related methodologies that predict the occurrence probability of a specific event and that also predict the conditional probability of a first event given a second event. The conditional probability can be interpreted as the impact of the second event on the first. Most of the CIA methodologies are q...

Some governmental organizations process a large number of research and development (R&D) projects simultaneously in their R&D program. For the planning of such a R&D program, decision makers can be supported by providing an overview that contains summaries of all currently running projects because they normally are not experts in all concerned R&D...

We investigate an automated identification of weak signals according to Ansoff to improve strategic planning and technological forecasting. Literature shows that weak signals can be found in the organization’s environment and that they appear in different contexts. We use internet information to represent organization’s environment and we select th...

The internet is a valuable source of information where many ideas can be found dealing with different topics. A few numbers of ideas might be able to solve an existing problem. However, it is time-consuming to identify these ideas within the large amount of textual information in the internet. This paper introduces a new web mining approach that en...

In recent years, governmental and industrial espionage becomes an increased problem for governments and corporations. Especially information about current technology development and research activities are interesting targets for espionage. Thus, we introduce a new and automated methodology that investigates the information leakage risk of projects...

The customer acquisition process is generally a stressful undertaking for sales representatives. Luckily there are models that assist them in selecting the ‘right’ leads to pursue. Two factors play a role in this process: the probability of converting into a customer and the profitability once the lead is in fact a customer. This paper focuses on t...

Many national and international governments establish organizations for applied science research funding. For this, several organizations have defined procedures for identifying relevant projects that based on prioritized technologies. Even for applied science research projects, which combine several technologies it is difficult to identify all cor...

A well-known problem in research and technology (R&T) planning is the selection of suited R&T collaboration partners. We investigate the use of textual information from the website content of possible collaboration candidates to identify their suitability. This improves the selection of collaboration partners and it enables a successful processing...

Multilevel security (MLS) is specifically created to protect information from unauthorized access. In MLS, documents are assigned to a security label by a trusted subject e.g. an authorized user and based on this assignment; the access to documents is allowed or denied. Using a large number of security labels lead to a complex administration in MLS...

We analyze the impact of textual information from e-commerce companies’ websites on their commercial success. The textual information is extracted from web content of e-commerce companies divided into the Top 100 worldwide most successful companies and into the Top 101 to 500 worldwide most successful companies. It is shown that latent semantic con...

We investigate e-commerce success factors concerning their impact on the success of commerce transactions between businesses companies. In scientific literature, many e-commerce success factors are introduced. Most of them are focused on companies' website quality. They are evaluated concerning companies' success in the business-to- consumer (B2C)...

We investigate the issue of predicting new customers as profitable based on information about existing customers in a business-to-business environment. In particular, we show how latent semantic concepts from textual information of existing customers’ websites can be used to uncover characteristics of websites of companies that will turn into profi...

In literature, idea mining is introduced as an approach that extracts interesting ideas from textual information. Idea mining research shows that the quality of the results strongly depends on the domain. This is because ideas from different domains consist of different properties. Related research has identified the idea properties for the medical...

Data protection and information security can be assured by using a multi-level-security (MLS) access control model. However, a workflow between persons with different security levels is complicated by the fact that the exchange of information is only allowed in one direction: from persons that are assigned to a specific security level to person tha...

We investigate a semi-automated identification of technical problems occurred by armed forces weapon systems during mission of war. The proposed methodology is based on a semantic analysis of textual information in reports from soldiers (war logs). Latent semantic indexing (LSI) with non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) as technique from multiva...

We introduce usability based modeling as new approach to enable an advanced IT-security in electronic engineering. Operating systems based on multi-level-security (MLS) are modeled. These systems contain IT-security as an inherent feature however they also consists of many restrictions for users. Modeling increases the usability of these systems by...

We investigate a robust and intelligent logistic system for emergency management where existing commercial logistic systems are loosely coupled with logistic systems of emergency management organizations and armed forces. This system is used to supply the population in case of a disaster where a high impact of environmental conditions on logistics...

Working with existing multi-level-security (MLS) models reduces the usability especially when users try to transfer information to persons with different security categories. A main reason for the problems occurring with the information exchanging is that the existing MLS models assign a specific security level to documents. The assigned security l...

In the last years, an increasing collaboration between defense and (civil) security, especially in technological areas can be observed. Here, an approach that automatically extracts relationships among defense - based technologies and security - based technologies is introduced. Information about these relationships can be used as planning support...

In this paper, we focus on consumer's needs for new products. Normally consumers search for these new products in internet by using a web search engine. They focus on websites of specific selected enterprises where they suppose the existence of such new products. Very often, consumers only get information from enterprise websites about existing pro...

Literature introduces idea mining as an approach for extracting interesting ideas from textual information. Related research focuses on extracting technological ideas as starting point for future technological research and development activities. Thus, it is limited to the technological domain. The algorithms standing behind idea mining also are op...

This approach introduces idea mining as process of extracting new and useful ideas from unstructured text. We use an idea definition from technique philosophy and we focus on ideas that can be used to solve technological problems.The rationale for the idea mining approach is taken over from psychology and cognitive science and follows how persons c...

The planning of technological research and development (R&D) is demanding in areas with many relationships between technologies. To support decision makers of a government organization with R&D planning in these areas, a methodology to make the technology impact more transparent is introduced. The method shows current technology impact and impact t...

Here, we present an approach for automatically identifying the innovative potential of new technological ideas extracted from textual information. The starting point of each innovation is a good and new idea. Unfortunately, a high percentage of innovations fail, which means many ideas do not have the potential to become an innovation in future. The...

Here we introduce a web mining approach for automatically identifying new product ideas extracted from web logs. A web log - also known as blog - is a web site that provides commentary, news, and further information on a subject written by individual persons. We can find a large amount of web logs for nearly each topic where consumers present their...

Öffentliche Aufträge, die auf der Grundlage staatlich eingestufter Informationen ausgeschrieben werden, setzen beim Auftragnehmer eine vorhandene gesetzeskonforme Infrastruktur voraus, um die geforderte Vertraulichkeit zu gewährleisten. Vor diesem Hintergrund gestaltet sich die IT-Bearbeitung solcher Informationen als sehr aufwändig und kosteninten...

Text mining refers generally to the process of deriving high quality information from unstructured texts. Unstructured texts come in many shapes and sizes. It may be stored in research papers, articles in technical periodicals, reports, documents, web pages etc. Here we introduce a new approach for finding textual patterns representing new technolo...

Die Planung von Forschung- und Technologie (FuT) "lebt" unter anderem davon, dass (neben der Aussonderung abgeschlossener Vorhaben) entsprechend den allgemeinen Fortschritten in FuT neue Technologien und Vorhaben aufgenommen werden. Die Auswahl von Vorhaben und den hinter den Vorhaben stehenden Technologien erfolgt hier über eine Methodik aus dem B...

Selbstheilende Materialien werden von Materialforschern als vielversprechende Zukunftstechnologie gesehen. Bisher wagte jedoch noch niemand eine wissenschaftlich fundierte Prognose, wann solche Materialien tatsächlich zum Einsatz kommen werden. Zu unsicher sind die Randbedingungen und die zukünftige Entwicklung wichtiger technischer und gesellschaf...