Data Science

Related Faculty

Alumni (MIMS 2006)
Assistant Professor of Practice
Science and technology studies; computer-supported cooperative work and social computing; education; anthropology; youth technocultures; ideology and inequity; critical data science
Assistant Professor of Practice
Predictive medicine; artificial intelligence; machine learning; tele-health; information disclosure; privacy; security.
Associate Professor
Natural language processing, computational social science, machine learning, digital humanities
Professor
Trust, social exchange, social psychology, and information exchange
Professor
Biosensory computing; climate informatics; information economics and policy

Recent Publications

This essay explores the changing significance of gender in fiction, asking especially whether its prominence in characterization has varied from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. The authors found that while gender roles were becoming more flexible, the space actually allotted to (real, and fictional) women on the shelves of libraries was contracting sharply.

The path towards a more democratized learner success model for MOOCs has been hampered by a lack of capabilities to provide a personalized experienced to the varied demographics MOOCs aim to serve.  Primary obstacles to this end have been insufficient support of real-time learner data across platforms and a lack of maturity of recommendation models that accommodate the learning context and breadth and complexity of subject matter material in MOOCs. In this paper, we address both shortfalls with a framework for augmenting a MOOC platform with real-time logging and dynamic content presentation capabilities as well as a novel course-general recommendation model geared towards increasing learner navigational efficiency. We piloted this intervention in a portion of a live course as a proof-of-concept of the framework. The necessary augmentation of platform functionality was all made without changes to the open-edX codebase, our target platform, and instead only requires access to modify course content via an instructor role account.

The organization of the paper begins with related work, followed by technical details on augmentation of the platform’s functionality, a description of the recommendation model and its back-tested prediction results, and finally an articulation of the design decisions that went into deploying the recommendation framework in a live course.

Data Science news

MIDS student Kevin Lustig has been awarded the Fall 2021 Jack Larson Data for Good Fellowship.

Ph.D. student Emma Lurie is researching potential bias in search engine results on California propositions, with data science support from Berkeley undergrads in the Data Science Discovery program.

5th Year MIDS student Ben Chu has been awarded the Summer 2021 Jack Larson Data Science for Good Fellowship for his work on improving supply chain transparency to end human trafficking and forced labor.

I School Professors Aditya Parameswaran and Niloufar Salehi are among a group of UC Berkeley researchers that recently won a 3-year, $2 million National Science Foundation grant to improve the useability of big criminal justice datasets for public defenders and others.

Outstanding MICS, MIDS, and 5th Year MIDS capstone projects.

New UC Berkeley public interest tech initiative ‘Fiat Justice Scholars’ will teach a diverse group of undergraduates both technical skills, and, how to think critically about the application of those skills.

Tony Di Sera (MIDS ’21) has been awarded the Jack Larson Data for Good Fellowship for her wide-ranging contributions to genomic research using data science and visualization.