News

UC Berkeley statistics professor Philip Stark serves as an expert in response to reporter requests on such wide-ranging subjects as elections, earthquakes, the lottery and gender bias in academia. While working with the media can be time-consuming and challenging, Stark doesn’t hesitate to respond when contacted by the press because he views sharing knowledge in this way as a public service. "We work for a...

According to the 2022 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, web application attacks account for over 60% of security incidents and over 40% of confirmed data breaches. Conceived last September and officially launched this summer, Web Application Security Assessment class, headed by lecturer Jennia Hizver, is addressing this major cybersecurity issue. A joint venture between the I School’s Master of Information & Cybersecurity (MICS) program and...

Data science students partnered with IBM to investigate the intersection of mangrove forests and climate change. "Mangroves help with carbon sequestration and are a key resource for biodiversity, so it's really important to see exactly what kinds of effects climate change is having on them," said Lori Khashaki, one of six Berkeley students who participated in the project. "We wanted to work on the problem...

Meiqing Li came to UC Berkeley to study sustainable transportation. While completing her College of Environmental Design doctoral program, she collaborated with artificial intelligence (AI) experts and saw how these methods expanded the possibilities and impact of her work. Earlier this year, Li was looking for more people who were open to multidisciplinary partnerships. She found that in the inaugural Climate Change AI Summer School...

Data scientists don’t just work in the field of data science. As big data tools permeate more and more of our social structure, they can also play a valuable role in communicating about how technological systems work and what they mean for the public. The UC Berkeley course Digital Accountability: Exploring Section 230 provided an opportunity for data science students and others to do just...

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...