# From the Directors: A Fall Update September 05, 2023 ![Elizabeth Jackson and Gary King](/sites/g/files/omnuum8171/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/harvard-iqss/files/e-jackson_g-king_alt_sq.jpg?itok=bzLGjImu) This last year has brought a lot of exciting and transformative advancements at IQSS and across the social sciences. Here are a few highlights. [The Dataverse Project](https://dataverse.org/) continued its community growth worldwide (now at 100 installations, thousands of dataverses, and millions of dataset downloads). We are in the process of a major restructuring of the Dataverse UI as a “single-page application,” which will enable us and others to build their own UIs for Dataverse, allow a wide variety of other applications to be integrated into Dataverse, and make it easy to make novel statistical innovations instantly available to users of Dataverse, and further empower the community. The Dataverse Project is also part of an effort by the [Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS)](https://datascience.nih.gov/about/odss) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to launch a new data curation, sharing, and interoperability initiative in collaborative ways across repositories. Our team is also testing experimental code leveraging large language model (LLM) applications within Dataverse so that you can talk to Dataverse and ask it questions about Dataverse. Join us as we explore the possibilities and potential of these and other new technologies within Dataverse and to discover new ways to improve your data management workflow. IQSS has also been expanding the Alexander and Diviya Magaro [Peer Pre-Review Program](https://pre-review.iq.harvard.edu/index.php/iqss/AboutTheProgram)—a service that aims to improve scholarship by accelerating the journal submission and acceptance process—by building out a multi-institutional consortium. The Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis is [the first affiliate to partner with IQSS](https://source.wustl.edu/2023/04/washus-weidenbaum-center-joins-harvards-peer-pre-review-consortium/) and to add its own network of associate editors to the Peer Pre-Review Program’s editorial team. [OpenDP](https://opendp.org/), a collaborative project where the community of differential privacy experts and users have come together to produce a trustworthy repository of resources for deploying these technologies to open up sensitive data for research, analysis, and decision making, continues to advance. OpenDP is on its way to becoming the standard body of open-source implementations of “differential privacy” algorithms that can be used for statistical analysis and machine learning on sensitive data. OpenDP is the pathway that will bring the newest developments in this rapidly advancing field to a wide array of practitioners. Under its leadership, differential privacy has been introduced to many companies, the 2020 release of US Census Data, and the cell phone in your pocket. Our research computing team has continued to partner with the [Faculty of Arts and Science Research Computing (FASRC)](https://www.rc.fas.harvard.edu/) team to migrate social science users to FASRC. This ongoing partnership, along with ongoing collaboration among Research Computing and Data groups across the University, will enable social science researchers to advance complex research by having access to leading edge computing services. Our team had taken the main responsibility for building the UI for Harvard research computing services. Our technical and administrative teams continue to offer a range of key support services to our affiliates and broader IQSS community. From [Data Science Services](/data-science-services), to [Geographic Information Systems infrastructure](https://gis.harvard.edu/about), to [Sponsored Research Services](/sponsored-research-services), to Human Resources to [Client Support Services](/client-support-services), and beyond, our team’s expertise enables academics to advance impactful social science research. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, we have used new technology to open up our office space to share with the IQSS research community. Whether you are looking to connect with a fellow researcher or colleague, or just need a place to work for the day, we welcome affiliates of IQSS to come [join us in our office space](/book-a-desk) whenever you are available and there’s room. Our aim is to transform social science research from the art of studying the greatest problems that affect human societies to the science of understanding and solving these problems. We want to hear from social scientists about unmet research needs or ideas of scalable solutions that would improve your research. If you are not already part of the IQSS community, [come join us](/become-an-affiliate) in accelerating and transforming social science research. [Elizabeth Jackson](/people/elizabeth-jackson), Executive Director of IQSS [Gary King,](/people/gary-king) Faculty Director of IQSS, Albert J Weatherhead III University Professor Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)