News

Many traffic jams are caused by human behavior: a slight tap on the brakes can ripple through a line of cars, triggering a slowdown — or complete gridlock — for no apparent reason. But in a massive traffic experiment that occurred outside of Nashville last week, scientists tested whether introducing just a few AI-equipped vehicles to the road can help ease these “phantom” jams and...

Tesla founder Elon Musk took over Twitter last month and installed himself as its chief executive officer. Then he laid off half the social media platform’s workforce. Amidst these changes, he’s discussed charging users $8 per month to be verified on the platform and putting Twitter behind a paywall. UC Berkeley's Alex Hanna explains how how social media impacts our democracy; how Twitter has affected...

The federal government and research institutions must make science more accessible, reproducible and inclusive, NASA and UC Berkeley leaders said at an Oct. 26 event on campus hosted by the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society at Berkeley. It’s also urgent to diversify who is doing the scientific work, NASA and Berkeley experts said. While these aren’t new calls to action, national and global...

Berkeley researchers may be one step closer to making robot dogs our new best friends. Using advances in machine learning, two separate teams have developed cutting-edge approaches to shorten in-the-field training times for quadruped robots, getting them to walk — and even roll over — in record time. In a first for the robotics field, a team led by Sergey Levine, associate professor of electrical...

For years, researchers have advocated for scientific results to be more publicly accessible. Amid decreased public trust, open science practices make scientific studies more transparent and reproducible. They can also help accelerate discovery by offering access to the data, code, software and hardware that underpin findings. In a win for open science advocates, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) recently announced...

UC Berkeley’s Aaron Streets, associate professor of bioengineering, computational biology and biophysics, has been named to Popular Science’s Brilliant 10, a list honoring trailblazing early-career scientists and engineers who are tackling pressing challenges with innovative solutions. The publication noted Streets’ contributions to the Human Cell Atlas, an international research effort to catalog the types and properties of all cells found in the human body. This...

UC Berkeley’s Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) has hired Colette Patt as its first-ever assistant dean for diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging and justice (DEIBJ). Patt, a nationally renowned diversity, equity and inclusion scholar and leader, will use a data-driven approach and the CDSS community’s expertise and experiences to help the division incorporate DEIBJ into its education, research and institution. Patt will work...

As a child growing up in Oakland, Miya Hayes remembers the prestige and allure that UC Berkeley represented in her community. Being one of the best academic institutions in the nation, it had a reputation for producing innovative research and changemaking leaders with global impact. Hayes, who hoped to attend Berkeley as an undergraduate, took advanced-level courses at the university in middle school and high...

How will emerging technologies shape the future of war and peace? How might a new era of strategic competition between superpowers complicate matters? What steps should governments take to mitigate the risks posed by autonomous technologies used in war? Many of the most important challenges that we face as we move into the 21st century involve problems for which we have no or little data...

Ron Cohen has recently been appointed the executive associate dean at UC Berkeley’s Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS). A distinguished professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Earth and Planetary Science, Cohen joins CDSS after completing two years of service with the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate in August, first as vice chair and then chair. Cohen was involved in the...