At UC Berkeley, we believe that technical skills alone are not enough to prepare students for the complex, data-driven world they will shape. Our Human Contexts and Ethics (HCE) curriculum grounds data science education in real-world contexts, equipping students to navigate the social, historical, and ethical dimensions of their work. This approach is a hallmark of Berkeley’s program and one of the reasons our graduates stand out as both innovative thinkers and responsible leaders. Our curriculum includes both dedicated HCE courses and modules that we’ve integrated into existing technical courses.
For an overview of our dedicated courses, please look at the dedicated course website below. If you’d like access to additional materials and information about the course, please contact us at aedmundson@berkeley.edu
Course Websites
If you’re interested in adapting additional materials from these courses, feel free to contact us at aedmundson@berkeley.edu
Data 104: Human Contexts and Ethics of Data
Public Course Materials
Discussion Materials
A standalone image-based discussion activity for teaching students to think about technologies not only as material objects, but as collective imaginations about the future. By examining past representations of technological futures, students can learn to denaturalize the hopes and fears invested in contemporary data-driven technologies.
A standalone discussion activity for teaching students about the ethics and politics of “classification.” By asking students to build their own classification system, this activity helps students recognize the power of the classification systems, which, far from neutral, are shaped by choices that reflect the values of their designers.
Jupyter Notebooks
Data 4AC: Data and Justice
Algorithmic Fairness: Module on COMPAS
Coming soon
Data 100
Project A: Property Tax Assessment in Cook County
A two part project based on a real world case study with supplementary lecture and discussion materials.
Coming soon