Science Policy Studies

Optimizing Interventions via Offline Policy Evaluation: Studies in Citizen Science

Volunteers who help with online crowdsourcing such as citizen science tasks typically make only a few contributions before exiting. We propose a computational approach for increasing users’ engagement in such settings that is based on optimizing policies for displaying motivational messages to users. The approach, which we refer to as Trajectory Corrected Intervention (TCI), reasons about the t...

On the Science-Policy Bridge: Do Spatial Heat Vulnerability Assessment Studies Influence Policy?

Human vulnerability to heat varies at a range of spatial scales, especially within cities where there can be noticeable intra-urban differences in heat risk factors. Mapping and visualizing intra-urban heat vulnerability offers opportunities for presenting information to support decision-making. For example the visualization of the spatial variation of heat vulnerability has the potential to en...

Informing policy with science.

e recently witnessed the peaceful—if controversial—transition of the United States presidency. As with any major change in federal government, the scientific community has concerns about new directions and priorities that may affect the way science is conducted, funded, and used in the United States and elsewhere. Of particular note with this new administration are concerns that President Trump...

Demography as social science and policy science

History of science and American science policy.

Historians of science have participated actively in debates over American science policy in the post-World War II period in a variety of ways, but their impact has been more to elucidate general concepts than to effect specific policy changes. Personal experiences, in the case of the debate over global warming, have demonstrated both the value and the limits of such involvement for the making o...