Andy Konwinski, co-founder of Databricks, Perplexity, and Laude Ventures, will speak at UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) undergraduate commencement ceremonies on May 22.
Already ranked #1 in the country by U.S. News and World Report, UC Berkeley’s Data Science major has recently become the largest on campus. An average of 1,960 undergraduate students were declared in the major between fall 2024 and spring 2025.
At a February 27 lecture at UC Berkeley, Princeton economist Zachary Bleemer discussed his research on the impacts of policies at universities that restrict student enrollment in high-demand majors. After the lecture, he was joined in conversation by Benjamin Hermalin, Berkeley’s executive vice chancellor and provost.
UC Berkeley researchers in chemistry and computer science recently reported on their use of an AI tool – large language models – to advance discovery in reticular chemistry and materials science. The perspective paper was published in the journal Nature Reviews Materials earlier this month by researchers at the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP) and the Department of Chemistry at Berkeley...
Adam Yala made an excited call from Sweden to his PhD advisor at MIT when he first saw the study results in September 2019. Their research group’s artificial intelligence model for detecting patients at risk of breast cancer from mammogram images – developed and tested in Boston – had worked consistently on Swedish patient data, without any adjustments. When the same thing happened months later...
Two early-career faculty at UC Berkeley's College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) – Natacha Crooks and Song Mei – have been awarded prestigious 2025 Sloan Research Fellowships. The fellowship is granted annually to “honor exceptional researchers at U.S. and Canadian educational institutions whose creativity, innovation and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders,” according to the Sloan Foundation...
Chan was invited to campus to give the first inaugural CDSS Dean’s Distinguished Lecture on February 4 to a packed auditorium in Sutardja Dai Hall. His lecture – titled “Rethinking Clark Kerr: The uses of the university in the age of generative AI” – reflected on Kerr’s contributions and considered how to prepare today’s students for a world enabled by AI technologies.
The Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) welcomed Kirstie Whitaker as its executive director last month. BIDS is an interdisciplinary data science community and part of the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. No stranger to UC Berkeley, Whitaker received her PhD in neuroscience before completing a postdoc at Cambridge University. She spent the last eight years in London at the Alan Turing Institute...
UC Berkeley has reappointed Jennifer Chayes, founding dean of the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) to a second five-year term. The dean term began January 1, 2025, and will end December 31, 2029
Jelani Nelson launched accessible, international coding programs, advocated for high quality public STEM education in California and, as of last fall, chairs Berkeley’s top-ranked Computer Science Division in EECS.
