We designed and developed the ASPI Critical Technology Tracker – a tool comparing which nations are leading in critical technologies such as AI, biotechnology, and robotics.

The website compares which countries are contributing the most research, and the flow of researchers between countries at various career stages — undergraduate, postgraduate and employment — identifying brain drains and brain gains in each technology area. The website is designed to facilitate informed public debate and policy-making around critical technology research.

The website visualises data based on an analysis of the top 10% most-cited papers in each area of research, published between 2018 and 2022, a total of 2.2 million papers. The Critical Technology Tracker shows that, for most technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US).

ASPI Critical Technology Tracker article asking Is There A Critical Technology Race — policy research web content by Mude Canberra

12k
Users visited the tech tracker within the first week.: 42k
Page views were generated, averaging 3.5 per user.: 60%
Of visitors were from the US, UK, Australia, India, France, Russia and Germany.

ASPI Critical Technology Tracker showing country rankings with China United States and Australia data — data visualisation website by Mude Canberra

The brief

ASPI came to us with a clear research mandate and a dataset that, in its raw form, was almost impossible for a non-specialist to engage with. The ICPC team had built a methodology using research publications and patent applications as proxies for national-level research innovation, capturing, at a macro level, the collective output of government funding, university research, and private-sector R&D. The dataset was rich enough to answer the questions that matter to defence and economic policy: who’s leading in quantum sensing, where the AI chip talent is moving, how the Quad countries combined stack up against China.

What ASPI needed was a website that could turn that dataset into something a non-specialist could actually use.

The brief asked for a homepage that introduced the project and routed users into the data; technology snapshot pages for each of the 40+ technologies; interactive visualisations including country H-index comparisons, top 10 distinguishing research priorities, Sankey diagrams for human talent flow, and tree maps for highly cited publications; a way to compare countries by technology and technologies within a country; downloadable raw data and shareable, citable links to specific visualisation states; a methodology section so the work could be scrutinised; a static-publishing architecture behind a CDN for security; and a backend the ASPI team could update without developer involvement.

The Critical Tech Tracker needed to be the kind of resource that gets cited in policy briefings and embedded in journalism. That meant the real design problem wasn’t “how do we visualise the dataset.” It was: how do we make a 40-technology, multi-country, multi-metric dataset feel like a story someone can read in five minutes and walk away with a defensible point of view.

We ran a full discovery process with ASPI’s ICPC team and described the audience as Quad-country policy makers. Discovery refined that into something more useful: a primary user set ranked by their actual impact on the platform’s success.

International journalists came out on top. A single referenced visualisation in a Bloomberg or Wall Street Journal piece pulls more downstream traffic and credibility than weeks of organic search. Australian and US policy makers ranked second, the audience the research was actually built to inform. Other Quad-country policy makers ranked third. Private sector general managers running Asia Pacific operations for the big tech players (the Samsung-scale operators thinking about supply chain, talent, and where to put R&D investment) rounded out the priority set.

The personas told us what each group needed from the platform. Journalists needed to embed and cite visualisations cleanly, with shareable URLs that preserved filter states. Policy makers needed to land somewhere that prompted the question they were trying to answer, rather than dumping them into a sea of controls. Private sector users were arriving with supply-chain and talent questions, not abstract curiosity. Every user group needed methodology transparency to trust the data enough to act on it.
The success metrics were equally pragmatic: monthly visits, average session duration, citations and references in third-party media, embed and direct link usage, and regular international interest from outside Australia. Every chart had to be readable in a sentence. A journalist or ministerial advisor needed to be able to look at a Sankey diagram of AI talent flow and walk away with a defensible line they could repeat in a meeting. If a visualisation couldn’t be summarised, it didn’t earn its place.

ASPI Critical Technology Tracker showing US-China technology comparison dashboard — policy research website design by Mude Canberra

ASPI Critical Technology Tracker showing China technology data with manufacturing charts — data visualisation by Mude Canberra

ASPI Critical Technology Tracker country comparison filter showing manufacturing data — website UX design by Mude creative agency

media coverage

The report and interactive website shared across multi-national news channels, sparking discussions from twitter to reddit

The homepage routes users into either a country-led or technology-led journey, with geo-location informing the default frame. Each of the 40+ technologies has its own snapshot page, grouped under higher-level topic clusters such as quantum computing, for example, sits as a parent topic for post-quantum cryptography, quantum key distribution, quantum sensing, and quantum computing hardware.

Inside each snapshot: country H-index comparisons, top 10 distinguishing research priorities calculated using tf-idf, a Sankey diagram tracking the global flow of high-impact research talent, interactive tree maps of highly cited papers, and a side-by-side comparison tool that runs the Quad combined against China or any custom country set against any other. Around the data sit the layers that make it citable including a methodology section, a glossary, downloadable CSV datasets, auto-generated citation strings, and shareable URLs that preserve filter state.

ASPI Critical Technology Tracker text showing China university military-civil fusion analysis — policy research content by Mude

ASPI Critical Technology Tracker showing post-quantum cryptography research rankings by country — data visualisation by Mude Canberra

ASPI was upfront in the brief about the security profile of the site. A platform analysing China’s critical technology research output, hosted by an Australian think tank, was always going to attract attention from state actors and malicious traffic. The brief specifically asked for static-publishing architecture, IP whitelisting for the CMS, CloudFlare in front of the production site, and vulnerability scanning before launch. We built to those requirements. The production site runs as a static-published version with no live CMS exposure and content and data changes are pushed from the editing environment to a flat, highly performant production layer.

ASPI Critical Technology Tracker asking How Is Australia Performing showing national research analysis — website design by Mude

ideation

deep diving low-fidelity ideas to explore how to best help the user navigate the data

design system & style

Establishing a design style, and building a comprehensive system outwards from the most granular components

ASPI Critical Technology Tracker researcher outflow data showing 682 total people with China 415 and US 97 — data visualisation by Mude Canberra

ASPI Critical Technology Tracker data dashboard with South Korea research metrics — web application design by Mude creative agency

ASPI Critical Technology Tracker citation generator and reference export feature — policy research platform UX by Mude creative agency

ASPI Critical Technology Tracker showing United States and Japan technology comparison — web application by Mude Canberra

The Critical Tech Tracker has become one of the most cited public-data resources ASPI produces. The launch generated coverage across major international outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, BBC, the Guardian, the Financial Times, and Bloomberg, and the data has been quoted in policy debates across the Quad countries and the EU. Australian government announcements relating to critical technology investment have drawn on the tracker.

The site has sustained international traffic from the audience segments identified in discovery — journalists, policy makers, and private sector strategists — and the embed and share functions have been picked up widely in third-party reporting.

For ASPI, the platform lifted the visibility of the ICPC’s research, ratcheted up the public-facing standard for think tank data work, and gave the team a tool they continue to build on.