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News and views

Blogs, columns and opinion from our contributors and editors

A teacher is marking homework and trying to decide whether a written piece of text has been created by a student or by a large language model, digital art. Created by DALL·E, prompt by Real World Data Science.

OpenAI’s text classifier won’t calm fears about AI-written homework

AI
Large language models
Classifiers
Screening tests

Educators are worried about ChatGPT being using by students for homework assignments, so OpenAI has released a tool to classify whether text is human- or AI-written. But relying on the classifier’s results is ill-advised, as some basic statistics shows.

Mar 15, 2023
Brian Tarran

Bikers in front of the United States Capitol in Washington DC. Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash.

US legislators get their data science act together

Data science education
Data literacy
Policy

A bill introduced in the US Congress wants to make funds available to develop data science and data literacy education across the United States. We sit down with education and policy experts to discuss the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Mar 6, 2023
Brian Tarran

A shopping trolley being pushed around a supermarket. Photo by Marjan Blan | @marjanblan on Unsplash.

Using ‘basket complementarity’ to make product recommendations

Market basket analysis
Recommendation systems
Complementarity

Purchase suggestions – e.g., “if you are buying that, you might also want this” – are, to a large extent, informed by the concept of complementarity: that certain products are often bought and/or used together. A journal paper by Puka and Jedrusik sheds light on how these product recommendations can be derived, as Moinak Bhaduri explains.

Mar 2, 2023
Moinak Bhaduri

Woman painting while wearing virtual reality headset. Photo by Billetto Editorial on Unsplash.

Data science can help close the ‘digital skills’ gap, or so it seems

Skills
Training
AI
Machine learning
Data analytics

A ‘digital skills’ gap is harming employer productivity and growth, according to a survey by engineering body IET. But the ‘digital skills’ that are needed sound a lot like data science skills: statistical understanding, data analytics, AI and machine learning.

Feb 14, 2023
Brian Tarran

Photo of Heidi Seibold

Why open science is ‘just good science in a digital era’

Open science
Reproducible research

Real World Data Science speaks with statistician and data scientist Heidi Seibold about open science: what it means, the benefits of it, and how to move towards it.

Feb 3, 2023
Brian Tarran

Photo of Detlef Nauck

ChatGPT can hold a conversation, but lacks knowledge representation and original sources for verification

Machine learning
Large language models
AI

ChatGPT represents a next step in the evolution of large language models, says Detlef Nauck. However, there are still major challenges - and concerns - to overcome.

Jan 27, 2023
Brian Tarran

Photo of Erica Thompson

How to ‘Escape from Model Land’: an interview with Erica Thompson

Modelling
Ethics

Author Erica Thompson talks to Real World Data Science about the ‘social element’ of mathematical modelling, how it manifests, and what to do about it.

Jan 25, 2023
Brian Tarran

A researcher in a field shines a light on stylised waves of noise, as if attempting to identify or extract a signal. Image generated by DALL.E 2 from prompts provided by Real World Data Science.

Pulling patterns out of data with a graph

Data management
Dimension reduction
Graph theory

Large volumes of data are pouring in every day from scientific experiments, so much so that it is now commonplace to perform dimension reduction in order to reduce a large number of measurements to a set of key values that are easier to visualize and interpret. Enter ‘The Sequencer’, a proposed method to find trends within high-dimensional datasets.

Jan 24, 2023
Andrew Saydjari

Flyer for RSS International Conference 2023, for all statisticians and data scientists. Taking place in Harrogate, 4-7 September 2023.

We’re taking Real World Data Science on the road

Updates
Events

Join us at the RSS International Conference 2023 in Harrogate, 4-7 September.

Jan 18, 2023
Brian Tarran

Photo of an email app on a mobile device screen, showing 2 unread notifications. Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash.

Explore the RSS Data Science & AI Section newsletter, right here!

Updates
Newsletters

We’re starting the year with a new addition to the site: a page dedicated to the excellent RSS Data Science & AI Section newsletter.

Jan 5, 2023
Brian Tarran

DataScienceBites logo. A dark grey circle with bite marks cut out. Overlaid text says, Import grad_students as writers, import new_research_papers as nrp, print(writers + nrp) and the title DataScienceBites.

Sink your teeth into some data science papers with our brand new blog

Updates
Content ideas
Call for contributions

Today we’re launching DataScienceBites – a new member of the ScienceBites family – offering bite-sized summaries of data science papers.

Dec 13, 2022
Brian Tarran

Photo taken from the backseat of a Lyft vehicle. Driver is seen in profile to the left of the picture. Phone is mounted on the dash and displays a maps app that is tracking the route to the passenger's destination. Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash.

Determining the best way to route drivers for ridesharing via reinforcement learning

A/B testing
Reinforcement learning
Statistics

A/B testing is often used to evaluate the impact of design ‘treatments’ — for example, are people who see advert A more likely to buy something than those who see advert B? Classical methods typically assume that changing one person’s treatment will not affect others, but what if that’s not the case? A paper by Shi et al. aims to address this problem.

Dec 13, 2022
Brian King

An image created by the Stable Diffusion 2.1 Demo. The model was asked to produce an image with the prompt, 'Text from an old book cut up like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing'.

LLMs in the news: hype, tripe, and everything in between

Machine learning
Large language models
AI

We’re back discussing large language models after two weeks of ‘breakthrough’ announcements, excitable headlines, and some all-too-familiar ethical concerns.

Dec 9, 2022
Brian Tarran

A screenshot of an exchange between Real World Data Science editor Brian Tarran and ChatGPT.

A chat with ChatGPT

Machine learning
Large language models
AI

‘Hello there! I’m a large language model trained by OpenAI, so I don’t have the ability to experience emotions or have a physical presence. I’m here to provide information and answer questions to the best of my ability. Is there something specific you would like to know?’

Dec 9, 2022
Brian Tarran

A photo of a black stencilled number 4 on a white brick wall. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

Four themes for potential contributors to think about

Updates
Key themes
Content ideas

Can data science save the world? What is a data scientist? What statistical ideas do data scientists need to know? And, what’s happening in the world of data science?

Dec 1, 2022
Brian Tarran

A black keyboard at the bottom of the picture has an open book on it, with red words in labels floating on top, with a letter A balanced on top of them. The perspective makes the composition form a kind of triangle from the keyboard to the capital A. The AI filter makes it look like a messy, with a kind of cartoon style.

Why large language models should come with a content warning

Machine learning
Large language models
AI

The outputs of LLMs seem impressive, but users need to be wary of possible bias, plagiarism and model ‘hallucinations’.

Nov 23, 2022
Brian Tarran

Portrait photos of 12 members of the Real World Data Science Editorial team

Meet the team

People
Biographies

Introducing the editors of Real World Data Science.

Oct 18, 2022
Editorial Board
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