Foundations & Frontiers

The ideas behind the impact: the concepts, tools and methods that make data science possible. In this section: DataScienceBites | Interviews

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Beyond Quantification: Interview with Professor Sylvie Delacroix on Navigating Uncertainty with AI
Interviews
AI
Ethics
Uncertainty

Professor Sylvie Delacroix discusses why AI systems must move beyond quantification to support professional judgment in high-stakes contexts.

Annie Flynn
Jan 29, 2026

Why Data Quality Is the New Competitive Edge For Data Scientists
Data quality

Data scientists were in high demand when they were set apart as coding wizards who could wrangle insights from large amounts of data. In the age of AI, everyone can code and…

Jan 27, 2026

illustration of AI uncertainty

Beyond Quantification: Navigating Uncertainty in Professional AI Systems

If AI is to genuinely assist professionals, it must go beyond quantification. More than simply accurate, it should be appropriately uncertain.

Annie Flynn
Nov 21, 2025

An image of the cover of the RSS Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

RSS: Data Science and Artificial Intelligence - showcase your research
AI
Data Science
Machine learning
Deep learning
Econometrics

RSS: Data Science and Artificial Intelligence is now open to submissions. It offers an exciting venue for your work in these disciplines with a broad reach across…

Feb 5, 2025

Growth of GDP with statistical graph, 3d rendering. Digital drawing. Credit: Shutterstock, Vink Fan

Nowcasting upgrade for better real time estimation of GDP and inflation
Forecasting
Machine learning

Atmajitsinh Gohil describes a recently devised 3 step framework that improves the accuracy of nowcasting.

Atmajitsinh Gohil
Jun 25, 2024

Photo of Julia Lane, professor at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and visiting fellow at RTI International.

Democratizing Data: Using natural language processing and machine learning to capture dataset usage
AI
Data
Machine learning
Natural language processing

Global Business Services Today speaks with Julia Lane, professor at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and visiting fellow at RTI International, about an…

Brian Tarran
Mar 11, 2024

Official photograph of US Census Bureau director Robert Santos, with US flag in background.

‘We absolutely have to transform and modernise our operation’ – US Census Bureau director Robert Santos
Data
Data privacy
Data literacy
Education
Public engagement
AI

Edited highlights from an interview conducted last summer with US Census Bureau director Robert Santos and colleagues, touching on pandemic challenges, the growing use of…

Brian Tarran (with Anna Britten)
Jan 15, 2024

Photo of national statistician Professor Sir Ian Diamond, standing, with microphone, during a talk.

‘I was pretty clear in my mind that we were into a no-going-back situation’
Data
People
Innovation
Data literacy
Public engagement

Global Business Services Today interviews UK national statistician Professor Sir Ian Diamond about culture change and innovation in the national statistical system…

Brian Tarran
Dec 15, 2023

Portrait photo of Andrea Saltelli, co-editor of 'The Politics of Modelling.'

‘I would like modellers to be less ambitious in developing monster models that are impossible to inspect’
Modelling
Public policy

Global Business Services Today interviews Andrea Saltelli, co-editor of ‘The Politics of Modelling,’ about pandemic models, trust in science, and why we must seek to uncover…

Brian Tarran
Nov 24, 2023

Portrait photo of Andrew Garrett, president of the Royal Statistical Society.

‘Statistics and data science are at the heart of the AI movement – we want to be a strong voice in the debate’
AI
Events
Algorithms
Risk

Royal Statistical Society president Andrew Garrett talks AI model evaluation and risk, and why training data and model inputs deserve greater attention in discussions over…

Brian Tarran
Oct 25, 2023

Photo of Helen Miller-Bakewell.

‘Feelings about sharing data can be context and time dependent – you can’t just do one survey or focus group’
Data sharing
Data linkage
Public engagement

Global Business Services Today sits down with Helen Miller-Bakewell of the UK Office for Statistics Regulation to talk data sharing and linkage in government – progress…

Brian Tarran
Oct 16, 2023

R-Girls logo layered on top of a classroom scene, rendered in bright pastel colours, created by Bing Image Creator.

‘What if we try to bring R to the classroom? That was our wacky idea’
R
Education
Outreach

R-Girls is a new project aiming to introduce R into secondary school lessons – just not through computer science classes! Global Business Services Today meets with one of…

Brian Tarran
Sep 25, 2023

Portrait photo of Alberto Cairo by JCA Photography

The many ‘dialects’ of data visualization: Alberto Cairo and ‘The Art of Insight’
Data visualisation
Communication

In his upcoming new book, journalist and designer Alberto Cairo explores the idea of ‘data visualization as language’, one with many different dialects – statistical…

Brian Tarran
Aug 1, 2023

DataScienceBites logo overlaid on a busy conference scene.

Heading to a conference this summer? Share your learnings here
Content ideas
Call for contributions
Events

Calling all summer conference delegates! If you’re heading to one of this year’s big statistics and data science events, consider writing about your favourite paper or…

Brian Tarran
Jul 17, 2023

New York road signs pointing left and right, both reading 'One Way'.

Choosing the right forecast
Forecasting
Prediction
Robustness

Practitioners often select forecast methods based on averages of scores from many probabilistic forecasts. But this is not without its difficulties. A recent paper by Bolin…

Brian King
Jul 13, 2023

Photo of London at night, with Big Ben clock tower towering over the city. Photo by Arthur Yao on Unsplash.

London Data Week is almost here. What’s it all about?
Data
Innovation
Events
Communities

The first ever London Data Week runs from 3–9 July 2023. Global Business Services Today meets with organisers Sam Nutt and Jennifer Ding to hear about their vision and plans…

Brian Tarran
Jun 8, 2023

Photo of Stephanie Hare by Mitzi de Margary. Photo supplied by Stephanie Hare, used with permission.

‘I’m way more into prevention than cure’: Stephanie Hare on why we need a culture of technology ethics
Technology ethics
AI ethics
Culture
Regulation

Stephanie Hare, author of ‘Technology is Not Neutral’, talks to Global Business Services Today about the ‘wicked problem’ of technology and AI ethics, and why laws and…

Brian Tarran
Apr 28, 2023

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…

Brian Tarran
Mar 6, 2023

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…

Moinak Bhaduri
Mar 2, 2023

Photo of Heidi Seibold

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

Global Business Services Today speaks with statistician and data scientist Heidi Seibold about open science: what it means, the benefits of it, and how to move towards it.

Brian Tarran
Feb 3, 2023

Photo of Erica Thompson

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

Author Erica Thompson talks to Global Business Services Today about the ‘social element’ of mathematical modelling, how it manifests, and what to do about it.

Brian Tarran
Jan 25, 2023

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 Global Business Services Today.

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…

Andrew Saydjari
Jan 24, 2023

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?…

Brian King
Dec 13, 2022
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