Who Owns Science?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Lisa Margonelli: “Only a few months into 2025, the scientific enterprise is reeling from a series of shocks—mass firings of the scientific workforce across federal agencies, cuts to federal research budgets, threats to indirect costs for university research, proposals to tax endowments, termination of federal science advisory committees, and research funds to prominent universities held hostage over political conditions. Amid all this, the public has not shown much outrage at—or even interest in—the dismantling of the national research project that they’ve been bankrolling for the past 75 years.

Some evidence of a disconnect from the scientific establishment was visible in confirmation hearings of administration appointees. During his Senate nomination hearing to head the department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised a reorientation of research from infectious disease toward chronic conditions, along with “radical transparency” to rebuild trust in science. While his fans applauded, he insisted that he was not anti-vaccine, declaring, “I am pro-safety.”

But lack of public reaction to funding cuts need not be pinned on distrust of science; it could simply be that few citizens see the $200-billion-per-year, envy-of-the-world scientific enterprise as their own. On March 15, Alabama meteorologist James Spann took to Facebook to narrate the approach of 16 tornadoes in the state, taking note that people didn’t seem to care about the president’s threat to close the National Weather Service. “People say, ‘Well, if they shut it down, I’ll just use my app,’” Spann told Inside Climate News. “Well, where do you think the information on your app comes from? It comes from computer model output that’s run by the National Weather Service.” The public has paid for those models for generations, but only a die-hard weather nerd can find the acronyms for the weather models that signal that investment on these apps…(More)”.

Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Sheon Han: “Nearly 35 years ago, Ginsparg created arXiv, a digital repository where researchers could share their latest findings—before those findings had been systematically reviewed or verified. Visit arXiv.org today (it’s pronounced like “archive”) and you’ll still see its old-school Web 1.0 design, featuring a red banner and the seal of Cornell University, the platform’s institutional home. But arXiv’s unassuming facade belies the tectonic reconfiguration it set off in the scientific community. If arXiv were to stop functioning, scientists from every corner of the planet would suffer an immediate and profound disruption. “Everybody in math and physics uses it,” Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “I scan it every night.”

Every industry has certain problems universally acknowledged as broken: insurance in health care, licensing in music, standardized testing in education, tipping in the restaurant business. In academia, it’s publishing. Academic publishing is dominated by for-profit giants like Elsevier and Springer. Calling their practice a form of thuggery isn’t so much an insult as an economic observation. Imagine if a book publisher demanded that authors write books for free and, instead of employing in-house editors, relied on other authors to edit those books, also for free. And not only that: The final product was then sold at prohibitively expensive prices to ordinary readers, and institutions were forced to pay exorbitant fees for access…(More)”.

Can We Measure the Impact of a Database?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Peter Buneman, Dennis Dosso, Matteo Lissandrini, Gianmaria Silvello, and He Sun: “Databases publish data. This is undoubtedly the case for scientific and statistical databases, which have largely replaced traditional reference works. Database and Web technologies have led to an explosion in the number of databases that support scientific research, for obvious reasons: Databases provide faster communication of knowledge, hold larger volumes of data, are more easily searched, and are both human- and machine-readable. Moreover, they can be developed rapidly and collaboratively by a mixture of researchers and curators. For example, more than 1,500 curated databases are relevant to molecular biology alone. The value of these databases lies not only in the data they present but also in how they organize that data.

In the case of an author or journal, most bibliometric measures are obtained from citations to an associated set of publications. There are typically many ways of decomposing a database into publications, so we might use its organization to guide our choice of decompositions. We will show that when the database has a hierarchical structure, there is a natural extension of the h-index that works on this hierarchy…(More)”.

AI Is Evolving — And Changing Our Understanding Of Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Blaise Agüera y Arcas and James Manyika: “Dramatic advances in artificial intelligence today are compelling us to rethink our understanding of what intelligence truly is. Our new insights will enable us to build better AI and understand ourselves better.

In short, we are in paradigm-shifting territory.

Paradigm shifts are often fraught because it’s easier to adopt new ideas when they are compatible with one’s existing worldview but harder when they’re not. A classic example is the collapse of the geocentric paradigm, which dominated cosmological thought for roughly two millennia. In the geocentric model, the Earth stood still while the Sun, Moon, planets and stars revolved around us. The belief that we were at the center of the universe — bolstered by Ptolemy’s theory of epicycles, a major scientific achievement in its day — was both intuitive and compatible with religious traditions. Hence, Copernicus’s heliocentric paradigm wasn’t just a scientific advance but a hotly contested heresy and perhaps even, for some, as Benjamin Bratton notes, an existential trauma. So, today, artificial intelligence.

In this essay, we will describe five interrelated paradigm shifts informing our development of AI:

  1. Natural Computing — Computing existed in nature long before we built the first “artificial computers.” Understanding computing as a natural phenomenon will enable fundamental advances not only in computer science and AI but also in physics and biology.
  2. Neural Computing — Our brains are an exquisite instance of natural computing. Redesigning the computers that power AI so they work more like a brain will greatly increase AI’s energy efficiency — and its capabilities too.
  3. Predictive Intelligence — The success of large language models (LLMs) shows us something fundamental about the nature of intelligence: it involves statistical modeling of the future (including one’s own future actions) given evolving knowledge, observations and feedback from the past. This insight suggests that current distinctions between designing, training and running AI models are transitory; more sophisticated AI will evolve, grow and learn continuously and interactively, as we do.
  4. General Intelligence — Intelligence does not necessarily require biologically based computation. Although AI models will continue to improve, they are already broadly capable, tackling an increasing range of cognitive tasks with a skill level approaching and, in some cases, exceeding individual human capability. In this sense, “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) may already be here — we just keep shifting the goalposts.
  5. Collective Intelligence — Brains, AI agents and societies can all become more capable through increased scale. However, size alone is not enough. Intelligence is fundamentally social, powered by cooperation and the division of labor among many agents. In addition to causing us to rethink the nature of human (or “more than human”) intelligence, this insight suggests social aggregations of intelligences and multi-agent approaches to AI development that could reduce computational costs, increase AI heterogeneity and reframe AI safety debates.

But to understand our own “intelligence geocentrism,” we must begin by reassessing our assumptions about the nature of computing, since it is the foundation of both AI and, we will argue, intelligence in any form…(More)”.

Behavioral AI: Unleash Decision Making with Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Rogayeh Tabrizi: “…delivers an intuitive roadmap to help organizations disentangle the complexity of their data to create tangible and lasting value. The book explains how to balance the multiple disciplines that power AI and behavioral economics using a combination of the right questions and insightful problem solving.

You’ll learn why intellectual diversity and combining subject matter experts in psychology, behavior, economics, physics, computer science, and engineering is essential to creating advanced AI solutions. You’ll also discover:

  • How behavioral economics principles influence data models and governance architectures and make digital transformation processes more efficient and effective
  • Discussions of the most important barriers to value in typical big data and AI projects and how to bring them down
  • The most effective methodology to help shorten the long, wasteful process of “boiling the ocean of data”

An exciting and essential resource for managers, executives, board members, and other business leaders engaged or interested in harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and big data, Behavioral AI will also benefit data and machine learning professionals…(More)”

A Century of Tomorrows 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Glenn Adamson: “For millennia, predicting the future was the province of priests and prophets, the realm of astrologers and seers. Then, in the twentieth century, futurologists emerged, claiming that data and design could make planning into a rational certainty. Over time, many of these technologists and trend forecasters amassed power as public intellectuals, even as their predictions proved less than reliable. Now, amid political and ecological crises of our own making, we drown in a cacophony of potential futures-including, possibly, no future at all.

A Century of Tomorrows offers an illuminating account of how the world was transformed by the science (or is it?) of futurecasting. Beneath the chaos of competing tomorrows, Adamson reveals a hidden order: six key themes that have structured visions of what’s next. Helping him to tell this story are remarkable characters, including self-proclaimed futurologists such as Buckminster Fuller and Stewart Brand, as well as an eclectic array of other visionaries who have influenced our thinking about the world ahead: Octavia Butler and Ursula LeGuin, Shulamith Firestone and Sun Ra, Marcus Garvey and Timothy Leary, and more.

Arriving at a moment of collective anxiety and fragile hope, Adamson’s extraordinary bookshows how our projections for the future are, always and ultimately, debates about the present. For tomorrow is contained within the only thing we can ever truly know: today…(More)”.

Unlocking Public Value with Non-Traditional Data: Recent Use Cases and Emerging Trends

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Adam Zable and Stefaan Verhulst: “Non-Traditional Data (NTD)—digitally captured, mediated, or observed data such as mobile phone records, online transactions, or satellite imagery—is reshaping how we identify, understand, and respond to public interest challenges. As part of the Third Wave of Open Data, these often privately held datasets are being responsibly re-used through new governance models and cross-sector collaboration to generate public value at scale.

In our previous post, we shared emerging case studies across health, urban planning, the environment, and more. Several months later, the momentum has not only continued but diversified. New projects reaffirm NTD’s potential—especially when linked with traditional data, embedded in interdisciplinary research, and deployed in ways that are privacy-aware and impact-focused.

This update profiles recent initiatives that push the boundaries of what NTD can do. Together, they highlight the evolving domains where this type of data is helping to surface hidden inequities, improve decision-making, and build more responsive systems:

  • Financial Inclusion
  • Public Health and Well-Being
  • Socioeconomic Analysis
  • Transportation and Urban Mobility
  • Data Systems and Governance
  • Economic and Labor Dynamics
  • Digital Behavior and Communication…(More)”.

LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research Method

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jacy Reese Anthis et al: “Accurate and verifiable large language model (LLM) simulations of human research subjects promise an accessible data source for understanding human behavior and training new AI systems. However, results to date have been limited, and few social scientists have adopted these methods. In this position paper, we argue that the promise of LLM social simulations can be achieved by addressing five tractable challenges. We ground our argument in a literature survey of empirical comparisons between LLMs and human research subjects, commentaries on the topic, and related work. We identify promising directions with prompting, fine-tuning, and complementary methods. We believe that LLM social simulations can already be used for exploratory research, such as pilot experiments for psychology, economics, sociology, and marketing. More widespread use may soon be possible with rapidly advancing LLM capabilities, and researchers should prioritize developing conceptual models and evaluations that can be iteratively deployed and refined at pace with ongoing AI advances…(More)”.

Oxford Intersections: AI in Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Series edited by Philipp Hacker: “…provides an interdisciplinary corpus for understanding artificial intelligence (AI) as a global phenomenon that transcends geographical and disciplinary boundaries. Edited by a consortium of experts hailing from diverse academic traditions and regions, the 11 edited and curated sections provide a holistic view of AI’s societal impact. Critically, the work goes beyond the often Eurocentric or U.S.-centric perspectives that dominate the discourse, offering nuanced analyses that encompass the implications of AI for a range of regions of the world. Taken together, the sections of this work seek to move beyond the state of the art in three specific respects. First, they venture decisively beyond existing research efforts to develop a comprehensive account and framework for the rapidly growing importance of AI in virtually all sectors of society. Going beyond a mere mapping exercise, the curated sections assess opportunities, critically discuss risks, and offer solutions to the manifold challenges AI harbors in various societal contexts, from individual labor to global business, law and governance, and interpersonal relationships. Second, the work tackles specific societal and regulatory challenges triggered by the advent of AI and, more specifically, large generative AI models and foundation models, such as ChatGPT or GPT-4, which have so far received limited attention in the literature, particularly in monographs or edited volumes. Third, the novelty of the project is underscored by its decidedly interdisciplinary perspective: each section, whether covering Conflict; Culture, Art, and Knowledge Work; Relationships; or Personhood—among others—will draw on various strands of knowledge and research, crossing disciplinary boundaries and uniting perspectives most appropriate for the context at hand…(More)”.

Differential Privacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open access book by  Simson L. Garfinkel: “Differential privacy (DP) is an increasingly popular, though controversial, approach to protecting personal data. DP protects confidential data by introducing carefully calibrated random numbers, called statistical noise, when the data is used. Google, Apple, and Microsoft have all integrated the technology into their software, and the US Census Bureau used DP to protect data collected in the 2020 census. In this book, Simson Garfinkel presents the underlying ideas of DP, and helps explain why DP is needed in today’s information-rich environment, why it was used as the privacy protection mechanism for the 2020 census, and why it is so controversial in some communities.

When DP is used to protect confidential data, like an advertising profile based on the web pages you have viewed with a web browser, the noise makes it impossible for someone to take that profile and reverse engineer, with absolute certainty, the underlying confidential data on which the profile was computed. The book also chronicles the history of DP and describes the key participants and its limitations. Along the way, it also presents a short history of the US Census and other approaches for data protection such as de-identification and k-anonymity…(More)”.