Melbourne awarded up to US$6.5m to evaluate experts’ IDEAs about reproducibility and replicability

Media release | Wednesday, 3 April 2019
In response to the ‘replication crisis’ in a number of scientific fields, a major international research program seeks to develop Artificial Intelligence to help evaluate the credibility of scientific evidence we use to make decisions.

The University of Melbourne is currently the only Australian team selected by the US Government’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) to work on the “Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence” or SCORE program.

With up to US$6.5m million in funding, the University’s team, Collaborative Assessment for Trustworthy Science or the repliCATS project, will assess the replicability of thousands of social and behavioural research claims.

This work will inform the AI component of SCORE. It will also help us understand how to recognise credible research.

The University’s team plans to crowdsource thousands of experts – working in psychology, sociology, criminology, economics, business, marketing, political science and education – to meet the SCORE challenge.

Associate Professor Fiona Fidler who is a reproducibility and Open Science expert will lead the University of Melbourne team. She said: “This is by far the most ambitious reproducibility project the social and behavioural sciences have seen.

“It will be a defining moment in how we understand the evidence base in the published literature of those fields.”

For the full release, visit: https://about.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/home.
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Media enquiries: Louise Bennet | 0412 975 350 | e.bennet@unimelb.edu.au