News

UC Berkeley will open a new Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public, creating space for interdisciplinary discussions about scientific discoveries, the ethics of that research and the public’s role in determining science’s trajectory, the university announced today.

The Berkeley Institute for Data Science has hired Ashish Sahni to be its new executive director starting in January, the institute announced Friday.

Long used in business, research design based on causal modeling studies “what causes what to move around” and is key to microeconometric research, which looks at the economic behavior of individuals, households, organizations or companies. A classic example is when businesses test marketing ideas through A/B tests, giving different consumers different options for buying the same item.

As artificial intelligence (AI) takes on an ever-higher profile in discussions about the economy, social and political issues and what the future holds, a trio of data science experts are calling for a reset in our mindset, and point to a 1950 paper written by noted mathematician Alan Turing.

Emma Lurie, a third-year Ph.D. student in UC Berkeley’s School of Information, found her academic calling in the political campaigns waged during the 2016 elections. Her relatives and other people she knew were deluging her with political emails that, to her, were blatantly untrue.

While taking a statistics class as part of her joint JD/PhD program at UC Berkeley, Renata Barreto realized she needed to use Python programming for assignments. So she looked for help refreshing and deepening those skills.

Sitting on a stage at the University of California, Berkeley amid four computer scientists, award-winning international artist and performer Angelique Kidjo took aim at social media platforms and the algorithms behind them for the harm they are inflicting on people and culture while racking up massive profits in the process.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $750,000 grant to UC Berkeley professors Niloufar Salehi and Catherine Albiston and University of Southern California professor Afshin Nikzad to support efforts by the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD)to implement a new elementary school zone-based student assignment policy.

The University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco, today jointly launched a new, one-of-a-kind program in computational precision health, a significant step toward advancing this new field and, ultimately, improving the quality and equity of health care.

UC Berkeley is 80 percent of the way to its $6 billion Light the Way Campaign fundraising goal, part of which includes the construction of a new building that will house the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society.