To combat obesity, in October 2022, the UK government became the first to introduce a regulatory policy that restricts the placement of unhealthy products in prominent supermarket locations, such as checkouts, store entrances, and end-of-aisle displays. Although the law has the potential to greatly reduce obesity, it may also have unintended consequences. This study will be the first to assess the overall effects of such an intervention, by analysing both consumer responses (i.e., calories purchased), as well as the reactions of brand manufacturers and retailers (e.g., offering deeper discounts on unhealthy products).

Social media have become invaluable spaces where we share ideas and debate important societal issues. But our current social media platforms make such productive conversations difficult by amplifying conflict and driving polarization. How can we redesign social media to help foster more productive political conversations? With the recent emergence of AI chatbots like ChatGPT, we finally have a way of answering this crucial question. This project creates synthetic social media platforms with thousands of interacting chatbots, allowing researchers to experimentally test how different platforms shape political discourse. This will help us design social media with more positive societal outcomes.

Worldwide, aging populations are placing pressure on healthcare systems, already strained due to limited financial and human resources. This study explores the role of animal-shaped social robots in Dutch elder care to support sustainable long-term care. Using ethnographic methods, it examines how these robots participate in daily care practices, what shapes people’s resistance to their adoption and strategies to overcome this, including non-technological resistance. Building on these insights, the project will provide guidelines to support personalised long-term care policy in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

The UvA LDCC was established in May 2021 in unison with a Data Science Centre (DSC). We have focused our activities on supporting tooling and services in RDM support, furthering the mission of the DSC to accelerate data science, co-developing RDM infrastructure and offering training in data/software skills and data science methods. By integrating an interoperability community manager and open research software trainer we strengthen our existing projects to further RDM infrastructure and training support, hence Open Science at the UvA.

This workshop brings together neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists, social scientists and philosophers of science to exchange ideas on two fundamental questions. First, how can we find good, mechanistic explanations in neuroscience? And second, what is needed for scientific progress? By inviting scientists from different disciplines, this workshop stimulates new interdisciplinary collaborations.