Internet Reviews

Dawn Behrend

AI Index. Access: https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index.

AI Index seeks to “provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, and globally sourced data for policymakers, researchers, journalists, executives, and the general public to develop a deeper understanding of the complex field of AI.” Based at Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), AI Index has a steering committee composed of both academics and industry practitioners, including a co-founder of Anthropic.

As a subset of HAI’s website, AI Index shares HAI’s top-level navigation. Pages you can reach from the top navigation are AI Index Report, Global Vibrancy Tool, and People. Lack of more-precise navigation within the AI Index conceals the extent of the content available and may confuse new users.

The heart of the AI Index site is the multidisciplinary, 400-plus page “AI Index Report.” Its webpage provides high-level takeaways from the 2025 report and chapter navigation, and (if you scroll far enough) it links to past reports dating back to 2017. The current report includes the following chapters: Research and Development, Technical Performance, Responsible AI, Economy, Science and Medicine, Policy and Governance, Education, and Public Opinion. It was published under a CC BY-ND license, and a Chinese translation is available. Current and past years’ reports are all freely downloadable.

Each chapter of the report can stand on its own for a researcher interested in that topic, and each has its own overview webpage and detailed table of contents. Many include “Highlight” sections addressing hot topics like “Energy Efficiency and Environmental Impact,” “Self-Driving Cars,” and technical topics like “o1, o3, and Inference-Time Compute.” Each chapter also has its own section in the extensive appendix, detailing information sources and research methods used.

The Global Vibrancy Tool, accessible from the website’s top navigation, uses data from the report to allow users to generate charts and maps interactively. Included topics are similar to report chapters (R&D, Public Opinion, etc.). Each topic has a variety of metrics to choose from. For example, R&D metrics include publications, citations, patents, and more. Options exist to compare up to five countries simultaneously.

The AI Index contains valuable resources for researchers interested in global AI progress. The fact that its data are made publicly available will doubtless be appreciated by scholars who wish to dig even deeper. —Emily Mitchell, SUNY Oswego, emily.mitchell@oswego.edu.

PopHIVE. Access: https://pophive.org.

PopHIVE, the Population Health Information and Visualization Exchange, houses deidentified health data from a variety of sources, including Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) syndromic surveillance data, medical records, and survey data. Detailed information about their data sources is included on the site. Accessibility, transparency, and making data understandable to a broad audience are core values of its creators.

A coalition of collaborators created PopHIVE, but the Yale School of Public Health is credited with leading the initiative. According to PopHIVE, the site was “developed by a dedicated team of scientists, epidemiologists, and public health practitioners.” PopHIVE is funded by grants and philanthropic donations.

PopHIVE was designed to appeal to a wide audience. PopHIVE presents its data in interactive visuals/charts, making it easily understandable for those without health sciences backgrounds. Undergraduate students researching health topics would find this site easy to navigate and would be able to interpret the health data in its visualizations.

Because the data come from a variety of sources, researchers, clinicians, public health workers, and policymakers can look for confirmation of disease trends between the data sets. Data interoperability and resiliency are key features that make PopHIVE different from other health data sources.

At the time of this review, PopHIVE offers data dashboards on childhood immunizations, chronic diseases, injury and overdose, and respiratory diseases. Each dashboard has a “How to use this data” expandable section, and each chart is accompanied by an “About this chart” button. Both features provide users with background information on the source of the data and how to use specialized features in the visualizations.

Data on all dashboards can be examined at a national or state level. County-level information is included when it is available. A dashboard for youth well-being is listed as coming soon. Data are up to date, and visualizations include a date when data were last accessed to update them.

Researchers are welcome to use data from PopHIVE in their work. Visualizations are accompanied by csv files that can be downloaded. Raw data and formatting code can be found and downloaded from GitHub. PopHIVE does request that researchers credit the site when they use their data. —Jennifer Markus, University of Wyoming, jennifer.markus@uwyo.edu.