Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020

3.6 An international comparison of AI
Austria’s position in the AI field compared to other 
countries is illustrated below with the aid of two ex-
amples: an international comparative analysis by the 
AI 
Index Steering Committee at Stanford University 
and recent analyses by the Austrian Patent Office on 
the number of and trend in patent applications.
In the former,
173
which was published recently, Austria 
is only included in the analyses insofar as it is men-
tioned that a relevant advisory body exists in the 
form of the Austrian Council on Robotics and Artifi-
cial Intelligence and that a strategy is being devel-
oped. In this connection, however, various secondary 
statistical data were also published that were anal-
ysed and compared as part of the so-called Global AI 
Vibrancy Tool.
174
Although this takes account of all 
relevant activities undertaken by the individual coun-
tries, the focus is not on comparing their rankings. 
173 See Perrault (2019).
174 See 
https://vibrancy.aiindex.org/
175 See Castro et al. (2019).
Nevertheless, analysing the data for Austria reveals a 
number of interesting findings. Comparing the data 
used for this purpose with those that take popula-
tion into account puts Austria above average for all 
high-wage countries studied for 2018 in terms of the 
economy (expressed as the spread of professionally 
relevant AI skills amongst the general population, 
number of AI-related start-ups established, amount 
of private investment in these start-ups, etc.) and in-
clusion (expressed as the percentage of women au-
thors in relevant AI publications as the only available 
data source). In R&D (based on the number of scien-
tific publications, patents and similar, insofar as the 
data were available), Austria came out below aver-
age. Overall, i.e. expressed via a corresponding com-
posite index, Austria has improved its position slight-
ly since the first analyses in 2015 and is ahead of 
countries such as Germany, Denmark and Finland. It 
must be borne in mind, however, that the main lead-
ers in developing and applying AI at present are the 
USA and China. In their analysis,
175
published in 2019, 
the authors from the Center for Data Innovation thus 
established that the USA was currently out in front in 
AI, with China quickly closing the gap and the EU 
lagging behind both countries. According to the 
study, the USA led the field in four of the six catego-
ries studied (talent, research, development and hard-
ware) and China in two (adoption and data). The USA 
scored highest in the analysis with 44.2 out of a pos-
sible total of 100 points based on the calculation 
methodology, followed by China on 32.3 and the EU 
on 23.5.
Plans to include AI in the Europe-wide survey of 
ICT use in companies this year will enable the posi-
tioning of Austrian companies to be analysed at least 
in comparison to their European counterparts. 
Amongst other things, there is set to be a module 
containing questions on the methods used to conduct 
big data analyses using AI technologies such as ma-
chine learning, natural language processing or natural 

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