Reproducible Research on Kailas Venkitasubramanian

Embracing multilingualism in data science

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Both of those efforts — reproducibility and pipelines — rest on a more basic question: which programming languages should a small research team actually use? In the previous posts of this series, I covered why reproducibility matters and how we are designing reproducible data pipelines at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. This post is about the layer underneath both.

Specifically, I want to argue that embracing multilingualism—fluency in both R and Python, rather than loyalty to one—has quietly done more for our team’s output than almost any other choice we’ve made.

Designing Reproducible Data Pipelines for Community Research

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the first post of this series, I argued that reproducibility is not a technical luxury for community research institutions—it is an ethical and operational obligation. In this post, I want to move from philosophy to plumbing—because this is where reproducibility becomes real.

Specifically: what does it mean to design reproducible data pipelines in a community research environment?

At the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, this question became concrete as we built the Quality of Life Explorer, developed deposit and extraction pipelines for the Charlotte Regional Data Trust, and began orchestrating workflows using Apache Airflow in an AWS environment.

Reproducible Research Framework at the Charlotte Urban Institute: Why It Matters Now

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In recent years, conversations about reproducibility have moved from academic journals into policy circles, foundations, and government agencies. What was once framed as a “replication crisis” in psychology has broadened into a wider concern about the credibility, transparency, and cumulative nature of scientific work across disciplines (Open Science Collaboration, 2015).

For those of us engaged in quantitative community research—especially in dynamic regional contexts like the Charlotte metropolitan area—reproducibility is not merely a philosophical concern. It is an operational one.