On July 2, the Harvard Data Science Initiative (HDSI) announced the launch of the Harvard Data Science Review (HDSR). The new multimedia platform will feature leading global thinkers in the burgeoning multi-disciplinary field of data science and makes research, educational resources, and commentary more accessible to academics, professionals, and the public.
The Harvard Data Science Initiative, launched in 2017, is a cross-University initiative working at the nexus of statistics, computer science, and related disciplines to gain insights from complex data in nearly every research domain. HDSR is its inaugural publication and is published by MIT Press. Its conception was inspired by Harvard Business Review and Harvard Law Review.
Combining features of a premier research journal, a leading educational publication, and a popular magazine, HDSR leverages digital technologies and data visualizations to facilitate author-reader interactions globally, according to the HDSI announcement.
The digital edition, free to readers around the globe, features an editorial by Harvard University Provost Alan Garber on essential knowledge of data science for educated citizens; a trio of articles on perspectives of data and data science from leading scholars respectively from social science, humanities and science; an industry perspective on the importance of balancing prediction and inference for business decision making; a trio of articles on the nature and history of AI and its roles in society; an interview with the co-chairs of a National Academies of Science report on undergraduate education in data science, as well as more technical articles on authorship attribution of Lennon-McCartney songs (which contains interactive musical features) and predicting drug approvals by U.S. Food and Drug Administration (which provides predictions for drugs currently waiting for approval). The “From the Editor-in-Chief” provides a succinct summary of both the current general understanding of the concept of “Data Science” and the 14 articles in the first issue.
“The revolutionary ability to collect, process, and apply new analytics to extract powerful insights from data has a tremendous influence on our lives,” said Xiao-li Meng, Whipple V.N. Jones Professor of Statistics at Harvard and founding editor-in-chief of HDSR. “However, hype and misinformation have emerged as unfortunate side effects of data science’s meteoric rise. The Harvard Data Science Review is designed to cut through the hype to engage readers with substantive and informed articles from the leading data science experts and practitioners, ranging from philosophers of ethics and historians of science to AI researchers and data science educators. In short, it is ‘everything data science and data science for everyone.’”
Francesca Dominici, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population and Data Science, and David Parkes, George F. Colony Professor of Computer Science, added, “With its rigorous and cross-disciplinary thinking, the Harvard Data Science Review will advance the new science of data. By sharing stories of positive transformational impact as well as raising questions, this collective endeavor will reveal the contours that will shape future research and practice.”
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