This commentary discusses opportunities for advancing the field of developmental psychopathology through the integration of data science and neuroscience approaches. We first review elements of our research program investigating how early life adversity shapes neurodevelopment and may convey risk for psychopathology. We then illustrate three ways that data science techniques (e.g., machine learning) can support developmental psychopathology research, such as by distinguishing between common and diverse developmental outcomes after stress exposure. Finally, we discuss logistical and conceptual refinements that may aid the field moving forward. Throughout the piece, we underscore the profound impact of Dr Dante Cicchetti, reflecting on how his work influenced our own, and gave rise to the field of developmental psychopathology.

Cyber-Physical-Systems provide extensive data gathering opportunities along the lifecycle, enabling data-driven design to improve the design process. However, its implementation faces challenges, particularly in the initial data capturing stage. To identify those, a comprehensive approach combining a systematic literature review and an industry survey was applied. Four groups of interrelated challenges were identified as most relevant to practitioners: data selection, data availability in systems, knowledge about data science processes and tools, and guiding users in targeted data capturing.

In “How Can Spin, Ply, and Knot Direction Contribute to Understanding the Quipu Code?” (2005), mathematician Marcia Ascher referenced new data on 59 Andean khipus to assess the significance of their variable twists and knots. However, this aggregative, comparative impulse arose late in Ascher's khipu research; the mathematical relations she had identified among 200+ previously cataloged khipus were specified only at the level of individual specimens. This article pursues a new scale of analysis, generalizing the “Ascher relations” to recognize meaningful patterns in a 650-khipu corpus, the largest yet subjected to computational study. We find that Ascher formulae characterize at least 74% of khipus, which exhibit meaningful arrangements of internal sums. Top cords are shown to register a minority of sum relationships and are newly identified as markers of low-level, “working” khipus. We reunite two fragments of a broken khipu using arithmetic properties discovered between the strings. Finally, this analysis suggests a new khipu convention—the use of white pendant cords as boundary markers for clusters of sum cords. In their synthesis, exhaustive search, confirmatory study, mathematical rejoining, and hypothesis generation emerge as distinct contributions to khipu description, typology, and decipherment.

Political opposition to fiscal climate policy, such as a carbon tax, typically appeals to fiscal conservative ideology. Here, we ask to what extent public opposition to the carbon tax in Canada is, in fact, ideological in origin. As an object of study, ideology is a latent belief structure over a set of issue topics—and in particular their relationships—as revealed through stated opinions. Ideology is thus amenable to a generative modeling approach within the text-as-data paradigm. We use the Structural Topic Model, which generates word content from a set of latent topics and mixture weights placed on them. We fit the model to open-ended survey responses of Canadians elaborating on their support of or opposition to a carbon tax, then use it to infer the set of mixture weights used by each response. We demonstrate this set, moreso than the observed word use, serves efficient discrimination of opposition from support, with near-perfect accuracy on held-out data. We then operationalize ideology as the empirical distribution of inferred topic mixture weights. We propose and use an evaluation of ideology-driven beliefs based on four statistics of this distribution capturing the specificity, variability, expressivity, and alignment of the underlying ideology. We find that the ideology behind responses from respondents who opposed the carbon tax is more specific and aligned, much less expressive, and of similar variability as compared with those who support the tax. We discuss the implications of our results for climate policy and of broad application of our approach in social science.

This study aimed to identify and understand the major topics of discussion under the #sustainability hashtag on Twitter (now known as “X”) and understand user engagement. The sharp increase in social media usage combined with a rise in climate anomalies in recent years makes the area of sustainability with respect to social media a critical topic. Python was used to gather Twitter posts between January 1, 2023, and March 1, 2023. User engagement metrics were analyzed using a variety of statistical analysis methods, including keyword-frequency analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which were used to identify significant topics of discussion under the #sustainability hashtag. Additionally, histograms and scatter plots were used to visualize user engagement. LDA analysis was conducted with 7 topics after trials were run with various topics and results were analyzed to determine which number of topics best fit the dataset. The frequency analysis provided a basic overview of the discourse surrounding #sustainability with the topics of technology, business and industry, environmental awareness, and discussion of the future. The LDA model provided a more comprehensive view, including additional topics such as Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and infrastructure, investing, collaboration, and education. These findings have implications for researchers, businesses, organizations, and politicians seeking to align their strategies and actions with the major topics surrounding sustainability on Twitter to have a greater impact on their audience. Researchers can use the results of this study to guide further research on the topic or contextualize their study with existing literature within the field of sustainability.

There are now an estimated 114 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, some 88% of whom are in low- and middle-income countries. For governments and international organizations to design effective policies and responses, they require comparable and accessible socioeconomic data on those affected by forced displacement, including host communities. Such data is required to understand needs, as well as interactions between complex drivers of displacement and barriers to durable solutions. However, high-quality data of this kind takes time to collect and is costly. Can the ever-increasing volume of open data and evolving innovative techniques accelerate and enhance its generation? Are there applications of alternative data sources, advanced statistics, and machine-learning that could be adapted for forced displacement settings, considering their specific legal and ethical dimensions? As a catalytic bridge between the World Bank and UNHCR, the Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement convened a workshop to answer these questions. This paper summarizes the emergent messages from the workshop and recommendations for future areas of focus and ways forward for the community of practice on socioeconomic data on forced displacement. Three recommended areas of future focus are: enhancing and optimizing household survey sampling approaches; estimating forced displacement socioeconomic indicators from alternative data sources; and amplifying data accessibility and discoverability. Three key features of the recommended approach are: strong complementarity with the existing data-collection-to-use-pipeline; data responsibility built-in and tailored to forced displacement contexts; and iterative assessment of operational relevance to ensure continuous focus on improving outcomes for those affected by forced displacement.

Statistical profiling of job seekers is an attractive option to guide the activities of public employment services. Many hope that algorithms will improve both efficiency and effectiveness of employment services’ activities that are so far often based on human judgment. Against this backdrop, we evaluate regression and machine-learning models for predicting job-seekers’ risk of becoming long-term unemployed using German administrative labor market data. While our models achieve competitive predictive performance, we show that training an accurate prediction model is just one element in a series of design and modeling decisions, each having notable effects that span beyond predictive accuracy. We observe considerable variation in the cases flagged as high risk across models, highlighting the need for systematic evaluation and transparency of the full prediction pipeline if statistical profiling techniques are to be implemented by employment agencies.

This article aims to explore the ethical issues arising from attempts to diversify genomic data and include individuals from underserved groups in studies exploring the relationship between genomics and health. We employed a qualitative synthesis design, combining data from three sources: 1) a rapid review of empirical articles published between 2000 and 2022 with a primary or secondary focus on diversifying genomic data, or the inclusion of underserved groups and ethical issues arising from this, 2) an expert workshop and 3) a narrative review. Using these three sources we found that ethical issues are interconnected across structural factors and research practices. Structural issues include failing to engage with the politics of knowledge production, existing inequities, and their effects on how harms and benefits of genomics are distributed. Issues related to research practices include a lack of reflexivity, exploitative dynamics and the failure to prioritise meaningful co-production. Ethical issues arise from both the structure and the practice of research, which can inhibit researcher and participant opportunities to diversify data in an ethical way. Diverse data are not ethical in and of themselves, and without being attentive to the social, historical and political contexts that shape the lives of potential participants, endeavours to diversify genomic data run the risk of worsening existing inequities. Efforts to construct more representative genomic datasets need to develop ethical approaches that are situated within wider attempts to make the enterprise of genomics more equitable.

Social media data are rapidly evolving and accessible, which presents opportunities for research. Data science techniques, such as sentiment or emotion analysis which analyse textual emotion, provide an opportunity to gather insight from social media. This paper describes a systematic scoping review of interdisciplinary evidence to explore how sentiment or emotion analysis methods alongside other data science methods have been used to examine nutrition, food and cooking social media content. A PRISMA search strategy was used to search nine electronic databases in November 2020 and January 2022. Of 7325 studies identified, thirty-six studies were selected from seventeen countries, and content was analysed thematically and summarised in an evidence table. Studies were published between 2014 and 2022 and used data from seven different social media platforms (Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, Pinterest, Sina Weibo and mixed platforms). Five themes of research were identified: dietary patterns, cooking and recipes, diet and health, public health and nutrition and food in general. Papers developed a sentiment or emotion analysis tool or used available open-source tools. Accuracy to predict sentiment ranged from 33·33% (open-source engine) to 98·53% (engine developed for the study). The average proportion of sentiment was 38·8% positive, 46·6% neutral and 28·0% negative. Additional data science techniques used included topic modelling and network analysis. Future research requires optimising data extraction processes from social media platforms, the use of interdisciplinary teams to develop suitable and accurate methods for the subject and the use of complementary methods to gather deeper insights into these complex data.