July Newsletter

Quite a month! World Cup kicking off, deals (or no deals) in the Straits of Hormuz, a potential new PM, and the hottest days on record.

Welcome to Real World Data Science, a new project from the Royal Statistical Society, in partnership with the American Statistical Association. We bridge the gap between rigorous analysis and real time relevance, meeting the pace and complexity of today’s data driven world with the RSS’s trademark steadying presence.

Latest content

A radiographer supervises a patient entering a CT scanner.

Linking Brain Injury to Cognitive Decline: A Multimodal, Explainable AI Approach within Trusted Research Environments

Traumatic brain injury generates rich multimodal data—imaging, ICU, EHR and biomarkers—that can be linked to later-life dementia risk. This article shows how…

Kafayat Adeoye, Emma Squires, Fatemeh Torabi, Simon Thompson
Jul 28, 2026

RSS AI Task Force says: AI Regulation Needs Statistics

We interview Task Force Chair Donna Philips amid calls for statistical considerations to impact the way that AI is regulated.

Annie Flynn
Jul 20, 2026

How to stay up to date as a data scientist?

Every month Piers Stobbs scours the internet to find you the most up to date information on AI/Stats/ML for the RSS Data Science and AI [section…

Piers Stobbs
Jun 25, 2026
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Is data science a new and exciting set of skills, necessary for analyzing 21st century data? Or is it (as some have claimed) a rebranding of statistics, which has carefully developed time-honored methods for data analysis over the past century? In this article, we use two popular data science algorithms to examine the difference between data science, statistics, and other occupations.

Jonathan Auerbach, David Kepplinger, and Nicholas Rios ask, ‘What is data science?’

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The Pulse

Applied Insights

Generative AI is based on neural networks, which are so-called ‘black boxes’. This makes it difficult or impossible to explain the inner workings of the model which has potential implications if in the future you are challenged to justify decisioning or guidance based on the model.

Excerpt from the UK government’s framework for the use of generative AI

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