News

UC Berkeley’s Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) has named Sandrine Dudoit the associate dean for faculty and research. A professor in the Department of Statistics, the School of Public Health’s Division of Biostatistics and the Center for Computational Biology, Dudoit served as chair for the Statistics Department from July 2019 until June 2022. Dudoit will work closely with Jennifer Chayes, associate provost...

Keeping sensitive data safe has sometimes come at the expense of speed when training machines to perform automated tasks like biometric authentication and financial fraud detection. Now, Berkeley researchers have solved this issue by devising a practical way to keep data secure while training neural networks. In a study presented at the 2022 USENIX Security Symposium, Raluca Ada Popa, associate professor of electrical engineering and...

Noor-Ul-Ain Ali, ’22, practically grew up in the shadow of the Campanile, in the neighboring east bay city of El Cerrito, and says that her first glimpse of what it might be like to go to college was as a participant in the University of California’s Early Academic Outreach Program, which assists underserved high school students with access to higher education. She didn’t even consider...

UC Berkeley and Imperial College London have won $5 million to create an international, interdisciplinary center aimed at advancing decentralization technology that offers users more control of their data, the Algorand Foundation announced today. The Berkeley Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence-Imperial London College Algorand Center of Excellence will – through research, education and events – help democratize access to data and ensure that data remains...

Scrolling through content selected “just for you” on social media feeds seems like a harmless pastime. But new research shows that some algorithms go from recommending content that matches our preferences to recommending content that shapes our preferences in potentially harmful ways. In a study presented at the 2022 International Conference on Machine Learning, a UC Berkeley-led research team revealed that certain recommender systems try...

Craig Newmark Philanthropies (CNP), the grantmaking organization launched by the founder of craigslist, has announced a three-year, $1.725M commitment to support the newly established Consortium of Cybersecurity Clinics, a network of organizations working to expand cybersecurity clinics at colleges and universities in the U.S. and around the world. Similar to clinics in schools of law and medicine, cybersecurity clinics provide students with hands-on experience as...

The U.S. constitution grants citizens a right to privacy. But in this new era where our lives increasingly include computers and data capture, legislators, regulators and others are grappling to define how the public’s right to privacy translates to these mediums. We spoke to Sophia Baik, a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley School of Information’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, about data privacy and why it...

Jennifer Chayes has been elected an honorary member of the United Kingdom’s premier organization advancing, disseminating and promoting mathematical knowledge. Chayes, associate provost for UC Berkeley’s Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society, is one of two honorary members confirmed by the London Mathematical Society this year, the group said in its July 1 announcement. The society highlighted Chayes’s “fundamental contributions” to mathematics, computation and...

UC Berkeley’s fifth annual National Workshop on Data Science Education brought together national and international perspectives on teaching undergraduate data science. Topics ranged from curriculum development to human contexts and ethics to student-led data science groups and programs. This was the first year the workshop was carried out in a hybrid format, with in-person presentations and training the first two days, online panels the next...

Tuskegee University and UC Berkeley recently announced the Berkeley-Tuskegee Data Science Initiative, a multi-year partnership to develop curriculum and collaborative research opportunities for students and faculty at both institutions. Charlotte Morris, president of Tuskegee University, recently met with Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ to discuss the new initiative. Faculty from both universities also discussed the partnership at the National Workshop on Data Science Education.