Incertitude Scientifique et Régulation des Risques Alimentaires – HOLYRISK

What is the role of scientific uncertainty in policy making' The project will examine empirically the effect of scientific uncertainty on food safety risk management in the EU and the US. In an interdisciplinary effort involving social scientists, food safety experts and computer scientists, we propose to build a data base of risk analysis documents including scientific risk assessment reports, cost/benefit analyses and risk management documents. The texts will be annotated and the different expressions of uncertainty will be coded and analyzed with statistical tools. Coding will be aided by machine learning. An uncertainty navigator will be developed to help to navigate visually among the numerous coded documents. Moreover, a system of case based reasoning will be constructed to aid risk managers in handling uncertainty and solving problem by finding the most relevant cases among the annotated texts. The quantitative analysis will be complemented by an in-depth, qualitative, comparative study of six hazards in the EU and the US. Apart from addressing important scholarly debates on the role of scientific knowledge in society, the study aims to provide useful knowledge to risk assessors in the way they conduct and present their scientific inquiry, as well as to risk managers in their decision making process. The resulting database and information management tools will create an infrastructure to help risk experts and managers to identify, compare and interpret uncertainties in risk assessment documents. The database will also be available to other social scientists interested in our research question.