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We have witnessed and experienced increasing compound extreme events resulting from simultaneous or sequential occurrence of multiple events in a changing climate. In addition to a growing demand for a clearer explanation of compound risks…
Understanding how individuals make decisions involving risk is a fundamental aspect of behavioral research. Despite the ubiquity of risk in various aspects of life, limited empirical work has explored student risk-taking behavior in…
The global climate crisis poses new risks to humanity, and with them, new challenges to the practices of professional astronomy. Avoiding the more catastrophic consequences of global warming by more than 1.5 degrees requires an immediate…
Making conjectures about future consequences of a technology is an exercise in trying to reduce various forms of uncertainty. Both to produce and reason about these conjectures requires understanding their potential limitations. In other…
In order to evaluate the quality of the scientific research, we introduce a new family of scientific performance measures, called Scientific Research Measures (SRM). Our proposal originates from the more recent developments in the theory of…
The "reproducibility crisis" has been a highly visible source of scientific controversy and dispute. Here, I propose and review several avenues for identifying and prioritizing research studies for the purpose of targeted validation. Of the…
P values or risk ratios from multiple, independent studies, observational or randomized, can be computationally combined to provide an overall assessment of a research question in meta-analysis. There is a need to examine the reliability of…
Much has been discussed in the philosophy of science about how we should understand the scientific enterprise. On the one hand, scientific realists believe that empirically adequate theories can be supplemented by interpretations that can…
The National Science Foundation (NSF) will be experimenting with a new distributed approach to reviewing proposals, whereby a group of principal investigators (PIs) or proposers in a subfield act as reviewers for the proposals submitted by…
The high fraction of published results that turn out to be incorrect is a major concern of today's science. This paper contributes to the understanding of this problem in two independent directions. First, Johnson's recent claim that…
The computing research community needs to work much harder to address the downsides of our innovations. Between the erosion of privacy, threats to democracy, and automation's effect on employment (among many other issues), we can no longer…
In physics the value of a theory is measured by its agreement with experimental data. But how should the physics community gauge the value of an emerging theory that has not been tested experimentally as of yet? With no reality check, a…
CONTEXT: There is growing interest in establishing software engineering as an evidence-based discipline. To that end, replication is often used to gain confidence in empirical findings, as opposed to reproduction where the goal is showing…
As belief around the potential of computational social science grows, fuelled by recent advances in machine learning, data scientists are ostensibly becoming the new experts in education. Scholars engaged in critical studies of education…
The emergence of "Fake News" and misinformation via online news and social media has spurred an interest in computational tools to combat this phenomenon. In this paper we present a new "Related Fact Checks" service, which can help a reader…
We discuss the problems of consensus and unity in science. The natural sciences seem to contrast with many other areas of endeavor in that a high level of consensus seems to exist in them. However, a careful analysis of the structure of…
Conversational AI systems can engage in unsafe behaviour when handling users' medical queries that can have severe consequences and could even lead to deaths. Systems therefore need to be capable of both recognising the seriousness of…
The proliferation of fake news on social media has opened up new directions of research for timely identification and containment of fake news, and mitigation of its widespread impact on public opinion. While much of the earlier research…
Data poisoning and backdoor attacks manipulate training data in order to cause models to fail during inference. A recent survey of industry practitioners found that data poisoning is the number one concern among threats ranging from model…
Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked growing concerns among experts, policymakers, and world leaders regarding the potential for increasingly advanced AI systems to pose catastrophic risks. Although numerous risks…