ECHO is DTU’s Observatory for Technological Questions in Society. The observatory combines computational and participatory methods to understand how citizens and societal actors envision, question and contest the technologies that shape their lives.

‣ What are technological questions in society?
Technology is about problem solving. In a democracy, this means debate about what problems to solve, how, and for whom. A technological innovation that offers solutions for some might cause problems for others and adverse consequences can be hard to predict. Actors with different stakes and different values will have different expectations, ask different questions and bring different experiences to the table. This changes dynamically as technology and society evolve.

‣ What does the observatory do?
The observatory maps the democratic conversation around technological questions in Denmark and abroad. This happens across news media, open online sources, interviews and other purposely generated data from fieldwork. The goal is to monitor issues and actor positions as they shift, model those positions for various kinds of scenario simulation, and support public engagement with technology.

Artificial intelligence (large language models in particular) has made it possible to work with qualitative data in completely new ways and at scales that were not before possible. The observatory exploits those possibilities on the level of both data generation and analysis and conducts basic methodological research to support its scientific validity.

The observatory is based at DTU Management where it brings researchers with social scientific understanding of the ethical, political, and sociocultural dimensions of technology together with methods experts from social data science and computational anthropology who are at the forefront of the AI-supported paradigm shift in big qualitative analysis. Uniquely positioned at a technical university, the observatory profits from its proximity to deep technical knowledge across the innovation front.

‣ Mapping the state of technological debate in Denmark.
From 2026, a key delivery of the observatory is an ongoing “weather forecast” for technological questions across Danish society. Through a data collaboration with a wide range of Danish publishing houses, the observatory detects technology related discussions from the media stream, parses them as individual actor statements, and analyses their semantic patterns and the way they shift. The ambition is to provide a shared infrastructure with continuously updated analyses in accessible formats, ranging from datasets and maps to scenario simulations. This will enable researchers, educators, and students to navigate the landscape of technological questions across DTU’s technological domains, integrate this knowledge into their research, and engage wider publics, thereby strengthening DTU’s role as a knowledge leader in democratic debates about technology.