The integration of generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) in healthcare presents both unprecedented opportunities and challenges, necessitating innovative regulatory approaches. GenAI and LLMs offer broad applications, from automating clinical workflows to personalizing diagnostics. However, the non-deterministic outputs, broad functionalities and complex integration of GenAI and LLMs challenge existing medical device regulatory frameworks, including the total product life cycle (TPLC) approach. Here we discuss the constraints of the TPLC approach to GenAI and LLM-based medical device regulation, and advocate for global collaboration in regulatory science research. This serves as the foundation for developing innovative approaches including adaptive policies and regulatory sandboxes, to test and refine governance in real-world settings. International harmonization, as seen with the International Medical Device Regulators Forum, is essential to manage implications of LLM on global health, including risks of widening health inequities driven by inherent model biases. By engaging multidisciplinary expertise, prioritizing iterative, data-driven approaches, and focusing
It is becoming increasingly important that physics educators equip their students with the skills to work with data effectively. However, many educators may lack the necessary training and expertise in data science to teach these skills. To address this gap, we created the Data Science Education Community of Practice (DSECOP), bringing together graduate students and physics educators from different institutions and backgrounds to share best practices and lessons learned from integrating data science into undergraduate physics education. In this article we present insights and experiences from this community of practice, highlighting key strategies and challenges in incorporating data science into the introductory physics curriculum. Our goal is to provide guidance and inspiration to educators who seek to integrate data science into their teaching, helping to prepare the next generation of physicists for a data-driven world.
In an age of fast-paced technological change, patents have evolved into not only legal mechanisms of intellectual property, but also structured storage containers of knowledge full of metadata, categories, and formal innovation. This chapter proposes to reframe patents in the context of information science, by focusing on patents as knowledge artifacts, and by seeing patents as fundamentally tied to the global movement of scientific and technological knowledge. With a focus on three areas, the inventions of AIs, biotech patents, and international competition with patents, this work considers how new technologies are challenging traditional notions of inventorship, access, and moral accountability.The chapter provides a critical analysis of AI's implications for patent authorship and prior art searches, ownership issues arising from proprietary claims in biotechnology to ethical dilemmas, and the problem of using patents for strategic advantage in a global context of innovation competition. In this analysis, the chapter identified the importance of organizing information, creating metadata standards about originality, implementing retrieval systems to access previous works, and ethi
Access to the work of others is something that is too often taken for granted, yet problematic and difficult to be obtained unless someone pays for it. Green and gold open access are claimed to be a solution to this problem. While open access is gaining momentum in some fields, there is a limited and seasoned knowledge about self-archiving in computer science. In particular, there is an inadequate understanding of author-based self-archiving awareness, practice, and inhibitors. This article reports an exploratory study of the awareness of self-archiving, the practice of self-archiving, and the inhibitors of self-archiving among authors in an Italian computer science faculty. Forty-nine individuals among interns, PhD students, researchers, and professors were recruited in a questionnaire (response rate of 72.8%). The quantitative and qualitative responses suggested that there is still work needed in terms of advocating green open access to computer science authors who seldom self-archive and when they do, they often infringe the copyright transfer agreements (CTAs) of the publishers. In addition, tools from the open-source community are needed to facilitate author-based self-archivi
Chest X-ray interpretation is one of the most frequently performed diagnostic tasks in medicine and a primary target for AI development, yet current vision-language models are primarily trained on datasets of paired images and reports, not the cognitive processes and visual attention that underlie clinical reasoning. Here, we present CheXthought, a global, multimodal resource containing 103,592 chain-of-thought reasoning traces and 6,609,082 synchronized visual attention annotations across 50,312 multi-read chest X-rays from 501 radiologists in 71 countries. Our analysis reveals clinical reasoning patterns in how experts deploy distinct visual search strategies, integrate clinical context, and communicate uncertainty. We demonstrate the clinical utility of CheXthought across four dimensions. First, CheXthought reasoning significantly outperforms state-of-the-art vision-language model chain-of-thought in factual accuracy and spatial grounding. Second, visual attention data used as an inference-time hint recovers missed findings and significantly reduces hallucinations. Third, vision-language models trained on CheXthought data achieve significantly stronger pathology classification,
The increasingly complex and rapidly changing global health and socio-economic landscape requires fundamentally new ways of thinking, acting and collaborating to solve growing systems challenges. Cross-sectoral collaborations between governments, businesses, international organizations, private investors, academia and non-profits are essential for lasting success in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and securing a prosperous future for the health and wellbeing of all people. Our aim is to use data science and innovative technologies to map diverse stakeholders and their initiatives around SDGs and specific health targets - with particular focus on SDG 3 (Good Health & Well Being) and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals) - to accelerate cross-sector collaborations. Initially, the mapping tool focuses on Geneva, Switzerland as the world center of global health diplomacy with over 80 key stakeholders and influencers present. As we develop the next level pilot, we aim to build on users' interests, with a potential focus on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as one of the emerging and most pressing global health issues that requires new collaborative approaches. Build
How has the science system reacted to the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic? Here we compare the (growing) international network for coronavirus research with the broader international health science network. Our findings show that, before the outbreak, coronavirus research realized a relatively small and rather peculiar niche within the global health sciences. As a response to the pandemic, the international network for coronavirus research expanded rapidly along the hierarchical structure laid out by the global health science network. Thus, in face of the crisis, the global health science system proved to be structurally stable yet versatile in research. The observed versatility supports optimistic views on the role of science in meeting future challenges. However, the stability of the global core-periphery structure may be worrying, because it reduces learning opportunities and social capital of scientifically peripheral countries -- not only during this pandemic but also in its "normal" mode of operation.
The uptake of machine learning (ML) approaches in the social and health sciences has been rather slow, and research using ML for social and health research questions remains fragmented. This may be due to the separate development of research in the computational/data versus social and health sciences as well as a lack of accessible overviews and adequate training in ML techniques for non data science researchers. This paper provides a meta-mapping of research questions in the social and health sciences to appropriate ML approaches, by incorporating the necessary requirements to statistical analysis in these disciplines. We map the established classification into description, prediction, and causal inference to common research goals, such as estimating prevalence of adverse health or social outcomes, predicting the risk of an event, and identifying risk factors or causes of adverse outcomes. This meta-mapping aims at overcoming disciplinary barriers and starting a fluid dialogue between researchers from the social and health sciences and methodologically trained researchers. Such mapping may also help to fully exploit the benefits of ML while considering domain-specific aspects rele
Rapidly evolving technology, data and analytic landscapes are permeating many fields and professions. In public health, the need for data science skills including data literacy is particularly prominent given both the potential of novel data types and analysis methods to fill gaps in existing public health research and intervention practices, as well as the potential of such data or methods to perpetuate or augment health disparities. Through a review of public health courses and programs at the top 10 U.S. and globally ranked schools of public health, this article summarizes existing educational efforts in public health data science. These existing practices serve to inform efforts for broadening such curricula to further schools and populations. Data science ethics course offerings are also examined in context of assessing how population health principles can be blended into training across levels of data involvement to augment the traditional core of public health curricula. Parallel findings from domestic and international 'outside the classroom' training programs are also synthesized to advance approaches for increasing diversity in public health data science. Based on these p
Precision health, increasingly supported by digital technologies, is a domain of research that broadens the paradigm of precision medicine, advancing everyday healthcare. This vision goes hand in hand with the groundbreaking advent of artificial intelligence (AI), which is reshaping the way we diagnose, treat, and monitor both clinical subjects and the general population. AI tools powered by machine learning have shown considerable improvements in a variety of healthcare domains. In particular, reinforcement learning (RL) holds great promise for sequential and dynamic problems such as dynamic treatment regimes and just-in-time adaptive interventions in digital health. In this work, we discuss the opportunity offered by AI, more specifically RL, to current trends in healthcare, providing a methodological survey of RL methods in the context of precision and digital health. Focusing on the area of adaptive interventions, we expand the methodological survey with illustrative case studies that used RL in real practice. This invited article has undergone anonymous review and is intended as a book chapter for the volume "Frontiers of Statistics and Data Science" edited by Subhashis Ghosha
During the past one hundred years three related elementary particles - the electron, the muon, and the tau - were discovered by very different scientific techniques. The author, who received the Wolf Prize and the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the tau, uses this history to discuss certainty and uncertainty in the practice of science. While the emphasis is on the practice of scientific research, the paper also explains for the non-physicist some basic ideas in elementary particle science.
Global rates of mental health concerns are rising, and there is increasing realization that existing models of mental health care will not adequately expand to meet the demand. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has come great optimism regarding their promise to create novel, large-scale solutions to support mental health. Despite their nascence, LLMs have already been applied to mental health related tasks. In this paper, we summarize the extant literature on efforts to use LLMs to provide mental health education, assessment, and intervention and highlight key opportunities for positive impact in each area. We then highlight risks associated with LLMs' application to mental health and encourage the adoption of strategies to mitigate these risks. The urgent need for mental health support must be balanced with responsible development, testing, and deployment of mental health LLMs. It is especially critical to ensure that mental health LLMs are fine-tuned for mental health, enhance mental health equity, and adhere to ethical standards and that people, including those with lived experience with mental health concerns, are involved in all stages from development through
Mauve is a low-cost small satellite developed and operated by Blue Skies Space Ltd. The payload features a 13 cm telescope connected with a fibre that feeds into a UV-Vis spectrometer. The detector covers the 200-700 nm range in a single shot, obtaining low resolution spectra at R~20-65. Mauve has launched on 28th November 2025, reaching a 510 km Low-Earth Sun-synchronous orbit. The satellite will enable UV and visible observations of a variety of stellar objects in our Galaxy, filling the gaps in the ultraviolet space-based data. The researchers that have already joined the mission have defined the science themes, observational strategy and targets that Mauve will observe in the first year of operations. To date 10 science themes have been developed by the Mauve science collaboration for year 1, with observational strategies that include both long duration monitoring and short cadence snapshots. Here, we describe these themes and the science that Mauve will undertake in its first year of operations.
YouTube has rapidly emerged as a predominant platform for content consumption, effectively displacing conventional media such as television and news outlets. A part of the enormous video stream uploaded to this platform includes health-related content, both from official public health organizations, and from any individual or group that can make an account. The quality of information available on YouTube is a critical point of public health safety, especially when concerning major interventions, such as vaccination. This study differentiates itself from previous efforts of auditing YouTube videos on this topic by conducting a systematic daily collection of posted videos mentioning vaccination for the duration of 3 months. We show that the competition for the public's attention is between public health messaging by institutions and individual educators on one side, and commentators on society and politics on the other, the latest contributing the most to the videos expressing stances against vaccination. Videos opposing vaccination are more likely to mention politicians and publication media such as podcasts, reports, and news analysis, on the other hand, videos in favor are more li
Classification of bibliographic items into subjects and disciplines in large databases is essential for many quantitative science studies. The Web of Science classification of journals into ~250 subject categories, which has served as a basis for many studies, is known to have some fundamental problems and several practical limitations that may affect the results from such studies. Here we present an easily reproducible method to perform reclassification of the Web of Science into existing subject categories and into 14 broad areas. Our reclassification is at a level of articles, so it preserves disciplinary differences that may exist among individual articles published in the same journal. Reclassification also eliminates ambiguous (multiple) categories that are found for 50% of items, and assigns a discipline/field category to all articles that come from broad-coverage journals such as Nature and Science. The correctness of the assigned subject categories is evaluated manually and is found to be ~95%.
GREX-PLUS (Galaxy Reionization EXplorer and PLanetary Universe Spectrometer) is a mission candidate for a JAXA's strategic L-class mission to be launched in the 2030s. Its primary sciences are two-fold: galaxy formation and evolution and planetary system formation and evolution. The GREX-PLUS spacecraft will carry a 1.2 m primary mirror aperture telescope cooled down to 50 K. The two science instruments will be onboard: a wide-field camera in the 2-8 $μ$m wavelength band and a high resolution spectrometer with a wavelength resolution of 30,000 in the 10-18 $μ$m band. The GREX-PLUS wide-field camera aims to detect the first generation of galaxies at redshift $z>15$. The GREX-PLUS high resolution spectrometer aims to identify the location of the water ``snow line'' in proto-planetary disks. Both instruments will provide unique data sets for a broad range of scientific topics including galaxy mass assembly, origin of supermassive blackholes, infrared background radiation, molecular spectroscopy in the interstellar medium, transit spectroscopy for exoplanet atmosphere, planetary atmosphere in the Solar system, and so on.
Dimensions is a partly free scholarly database launched by Digital Science in January 2018. Dimensions includes journal articles and citation counts, making it a potential new source of impact data. This article explores the value of Dimensions from an impact assessment perspective with an examination of Food Science research 2008-2018 and a random sample of 10,000 Scopus articles from 2012. The results include high correlations between citation counts from Scopus and Dimensions (0.96 by narrow field in 2012) as well as similar average counts. Almost all Scopus articles with DOIs were found in Dimensions (97% in 2012). Thus, the scholarly database component of Dimensions seems to be a plausible alternative to Scopus and the Web of Science for general citation analyses and for citation data in support of some types of research evaluations.
Background: This study aims to evaluate the Chicago Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative delivery optimization outcomes given policy-neutral and policy-focused approaches to deliver this program to at-risk teens across the City of Chicago. Methods: We collect and compile several datasets from public sources including: Chicago Department of Public Health clinic locations, two public health statistics datasets, census data of Chicago, list of Chicago public high schools, and their Locations. Our policy-neutral approach will consist of an equal distribution of funds and resources to schools and centers, regardless of past trends and outcomes. The policy-focused approaches will evaluate two models: first, a funding model based on prediction models from historical data; and second, a funding model based on economic and social outcomes for communities. Results: Results of this study confirms our initial hypothesis, that even though the models are optimized from a machine learning perspective, there is still possible that the models will produce wildly different results in the real-world application. Conclusions: When ethics and ethical considerations are extended beyond algorithmic optim
This white paper describes the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC), whose goal is the study of dark energy and related topics in fundamental physics with data from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). It provides an overview of dark energy science and describes the current and anticipated state of the field. It makes the case for the DESC by laying out a robust analytical framework for dark energy science that has been defined by its members and the comprehensive three-year work plan they have developed for implementing that framework. The analysis working groups cover five key probes of dark energy: weak lensing, large scale structure, galaxy clusters, Type Ia supernovae, and strong lensing. The computing working groups span cosmological simulations, galaxy catalogs, photon simulations and a systematic software and computational framework for LSST dark energy data analysis. The technical working groups make the connection between dark energy science and the LSST system. The working groups have close linkages, especially through the use of the photon simulations to study the impact of instrument design and survey strategy on analysis methodology and cosmological pa
The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment (OHIE) offers a unique opportunity to examine the causal relationship between Medicaid coverage and happiness among low-income adults, using an experimental design. This study leverages data from comprehensive surveys conducted at 0 and 12 months post-treatment. Previous studies based on OHIE have shown that individuals receiving Medicaid exhibited a significant improvement in mental health compared to those who did not receive coverage. The primary objective is to explore how Medicaid coverage impacts happiness, specifically analyzing in which direction variations in healthcare spending significantly improve mental health: higher spending or lower spending after Medicaid. Utilizing instrumental variable (IV) regression, I conducted six separate regressions across subgroups categorized by expenditure levels and happiness ratings, and the results reveal distinct patterns. Enrolling in OHP has significantly decreased the probability of experiencing unhappiness, regardless of whether individuals had high or low medical spending. Additionally, it decreased the probability of being pretty happy and having high medical expenses, while increasing the