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Child labor remains prevalent in Ghana’s cocoa sector and is associated with adverse educational and health outcomes for children.
A eureka moment is a two-step process: discovering something new and surprising, and establishing that it is correct. Drawing on her work at Axiom, Carina will discuss the transition from solving mathematical benchmarks to contributing to research, and from proving individual theorems to formalizing mathematical theories in Lean.
A eureka moment is a two-step process: discovering something new and surprising, and establishing that it is correct. Drawing on her work at Axiom, Carina will discuss the transition from solving mathematical benchmarks to contributing to research, and from proving individual theorems to formalizing mathematical theories in Lean.
Scientific progress is a key driver of economic growth and prosperity. There is great excitement- but also concerns- about the impacts of AI on science, but so far little data. We provide early insights on this from three data sources: a sample of 15 million Gemini interactions, an inventory of over 2,600 specialized AI models across disciplines, and a survey of over 600 scientists.
Scientific progress is a key driver of economic growth and prosperity. There is great excitement- but also concerns- about the impacts of AI on science, but so far little data. We provide early insights on this from three data sources: a sample of 15 million Gemini interactions, an inventory of over 2,600 specialized AI models across disciplines, and a survey of over 600 scientists.
The rapid acceleration of AI comes with a profound wave of anxiety. Across every sector of society, people are facing unsettling questions about their worth and their place in a shifting world.
The rapid acceleration of AI comes with a profound wave of anxiety. Across every sector of society, people are facing unsettling questions about their worth and their place in a shifting world.
This exploratory work examines how two surveys that measure child labor in Ghana (NORC and GLSS7), but differ in quality and scale, can be jointly leveraged for less biased prediction and to identify key predictors of child labor risk. We further investigate whether district-level satellite indicators, including yield-weighted cocoa-driven deforestation, newly lit area, and newly urban area, enhance predictive performance and play important roles in shaping model predictions. Using non-parametric machine learning models (XGBoost, Random Forest) paired with cross-validation and a hyperparameter grid search, we find that the best-performing model in classifying child laborers achieves an out of sample AUC of 0.95 and F1 of 0.84. Model interpretability tools (SHAP values, partial dependence plots) highlight influential predictors such as child age, cocoa-driven deforestation, school commute time, newly lit area, and household herbicide expenditures. In addition to emerging as the second most explanatory feature, cocoa-driven deforestation also shows a clear nonlinear association with predicted child labor risk. Our approach demonstrates new ways of grappling with data scarcity and bias in child labor measurement, while our findings provide actionable risk profiles to support monitoring efforts and underscore the complex interconnections between child labor and environmental practices.
