For patents in remote sensing, China is now the majority, with over 43,000 in a three-year period. This represents, again, a “dramatic reversal” from the 1990’s when the US was almost all of it. And the machine learning applications are growing exponentially, and China’s low-cost AI is driving a lot of the new research.
It’s also an institutional challenge for the United States. These data are from 2011 to 2020—so they’re over five years old, but by then Chinese institutions had taken the top six positions, out of the top 10.NASA and the National Science Foundation were at 7 and 8, and Europe had the last two. On funding, China’s science foundation spending was over 53% of output, compared to the US at 5%.
China’s remote sensing industry finds itself in a virtuous circle. More funding leads to more researchers leading to more research which means more patents, and higher levels of expertise, and breakthroughs in adjacent sciences, such as in Quantum Technology, and absolute ranging measurements in space.