✍️ Coursework (Formative)

2023/24 Winter Term

Author

Dr. Ghita Berrada

Published

02 March 2024

🎯 OBJECTIVE: Write a 1,500-word essay using Quarto Markdown and Zotero. (See 💻 Week 04 lab). Try using a custom theme (see this Quarto documentation page for information on Quarto HTML themes) to make your essay look more professional. You can also have a look at this page for further tips on how to customise the look of your Quarto page or at the FAQ page for further tips on Quarto.

⌛ DUE DATE: 15 March 2024 5pm

🗺️ Context

AI tools have long been thought to have quite some potential in medicine, from diagnosing diseases accurately to helping with correct drug prescription all the way to uncovering new molecule structures, be it new drugs, proteins or viruses/bacteria. But, there was always the promise and there was clinical reality…When the pandemic happened, the good, the bad and the ugly sides of AI in medicine were once again revealed. Many uncomfortable questions were brought forth and many lessons learned.

Scenario

You are a data scientist and you are writing an online article for LSE Blogs.

You have stumbled upon these three articles:

📖 Suggested readings

🎓 Academic

Feel free to use other sources as well, but make sure you cite them properly.

Your task

You are writing a blog post that reflects and comments on these three articles and more widely tackles the following topic: “AI in medicine: lessons learned from the pandemic?”. You do not need to use this exact title, just make sure you are writing about the same topic.

Your target audience is a general audience of non-experts, so you should try to explain the main ideas and arguments clearly and concisely. You should also try to make your writing as engaging as possible so that your readers can easily follow your arguments and understand the main points.

📝 Instructions

What we are looking for

Now here is what you need to do:

Read the three articles mentioned above. Use these articles and the concepts and techniques you’ve learned from DS101W (as well as any other readings you might have made) to consider the following questions:

  • can you briefly explain what the main ideas of the articles are and explain the basic principles behind any of the algorithms they mention?
  • can you make connections between the ideas we have discussed throughout the course and the case studies?
  • What are the core opportunities and/or problems these case studies bring to the surface?
  • can you reflect beyond the specific cases described in the articles and think about their wider implications?
  • can you explain the main ideas and arguments clearly and concisely?
  • can you use the right tone and style to engage your readers?

Structure of the Essay

  1. Your essay must be written in Quarto Markdown. You can use the template provided in the lab. Check, also, the readings listed on Weeks 7 & 8 of the 📔 Syllabus.

  2. Feel free to modify the layout and aesthetics of the template. You can also add images, tables, bullet points, etc. to your essay.

  3. On top of the three main references, you must also include at least 5 other references. You must cite these references in your markdown using Zotero (revisit 💻 Week 04 lab).

    • Any ideas, arguments or results that were not produced by your mind must be cited in the references.
    • 👉 Avoid making explicit references to the course (e.g., writing things like “As we saw in Week 05…”), as this would go against the spirit of the exercise, which is to write to a general audience. Instead, refer to the bibliography we have provided and try to make connections between the ideas we have discussed and the case study. The same goes for AI-generated text.

  4. Do not exceed 1500 words (bibliographical references and the (optional) generative AI section do not count).

  5. Make your writing clear, do not hide your thoughts behind jargon. You are not writing an academic article. Your essay is emulating a communication you would send to work colleagues who have very different educational backgrounds. You can find tips on how to write clearly and make your argumentation coherent in the Resources on clean and logical writing section of the 📄 Resources on argumentation and logical fallacies page on the course website.

  6. Do not plagiarise. It is not that difficult to spot that someone copied content from other sources and, frankly, it is very embarrassing if you get caught. Here is the link to the LSE regulation on plagiarism.

    • You are allowed to use Generative AI to help you write your essay. But you are asked to report the AI tool you used and the extent to which you used it. Read more about Generative AI in the section below. Check the Generative AI Policy for how reference use of Generative AI in your essay.

  7. Make sure you address all the questions.

🤖 Using AI help?

You are allowed to use Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT to help you write your essay. If you do use it, however minimal use you made, you are asked to report the AI tool you used and add an extra section to your essay to explain the extent to which you used it (this won’t count towards the word limit).

Note that, while these tools can be helpful, they tend to generate responses that sound convincing but are not necessarily correct. Another problem is that they tend to generate responses that are formulaic and repetitive; thus, limiting your chances of getting a high mark.

In effect, you are asked to explain the following:

  • What AI tool did you use?
  • How did you use it? For example, did you use it to generate ideas, write a draft, proofread your essay, etc.?
  • How much of your essay was written by the AI tool? For example, did you feed it the entire prompt and it wrote the entire essay? Or did you feed it guided questions?
  • If you didn’t edit the AI tool’s output, what was the output like? For example, did it produce a coherent essay?
  • What did you do to make sure that the AI tool did not produce gibberish? and that the essay was not formulaic.
  • Importantly, how did you ensure that the essay did not contain any plagiarism?

✅ Submission

  • Render your Quarto Markdown file to HTML
  • ⚠️ IMPORTANT ⚠️: Rename your HTML to DS101W-2023-formative-essay-<CANDIDATE_NUMBER>.html, replacing <CANDIDATE_NUMBER> with your candidate number. For example: DS101W-2023-formative-essay-123456.html
  • Upload this file to Moodle under the appropriate assignment.

✋ Getting Help

  • If you have any questions about the assignment, please post them on #help-assignments channel on Slack.
  • Book office hours.
  • Organise a study group with your classmates.

📑 Marking Scheme

(You will be graded as if this was a summative assessment.)

The following is the marking scheme we will use to mark your essay. Note that full marks mean that you have met a particular criterion to an extremely high standard, beyond our expectations. If you did “everything right”, you should expect about 70% of the marks on each criterion.

Detailed Marking Criteria Marks
1. The essay contains an introduction to the topic and it’s succinct and concise. 5
2. Your writing style conforms to the blog post style, i.e your tone and writing style needs to be relatively informal without being clickbait-y (you can look at BBC, Guardian or LSE Blogs pieces for inspiration) 4
3. Your Quarto Markdown formatting is appropriate for a blog post, e.g., style of headers, the inclusion of images, themes, etc. 5
4. Your writing style is clear and free of excessive jargon and abbreviations. 5
5. The essay concludes with lessons learned 5
6. The essay has a logical structure and flow 10
7. Your argumentation is coherent 10
8. You have succintly and clearly explained the main ideas of all three articles 3
9. You have given a clear explanation of the main algorithms mentioned in all three articles as well any algorithms you mention in your essay 5
10. You have managed to build connections between all three articles given in the topic 9
11. You have convincingly expanded the scope of your reflection beyond the case studies (i.e Guardian articles) we provided and built a solid argumentation on their wider implications 25
12. Your argumentation is not only solid but creative as well 10
13. You are widely read and make use of many judicious references (quantity matters but quality as well!) 4

References

Benaich, Nathan. 2020. “AI Has Disappointed on Covid.” Financial Times, September. https://www.ft.com/content/0aafc2de-f46d-4646-acfd-4ed7a7f6feaa.
Callaway, Ewen. 2023. “How AlphaFold and Other AI Tools Could Help Us Prepare for the Next Pandemic.” Nature 622 (7983): 440–41. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03201-4.
Heaven, Will Douglas. 2021. “Hundreds of AI Tools Have Been Built to Catch Covid. None of Them Helped. MIT Technology Review.” July 30, 2021. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/30/1030329/machine-learning-ai-failed-covid-hospital-diagnosis-pandemic/.