News

As an undergraduate mathematics student 14 years ago, Jacob Steinhardt began to consider a future where artificial intelligence would automate most cognitive work, which he thought could have an even bigger impact than the Industrial Revolution. “The future of AI seems pretty uncertain,” he remembers contemplating, “maybe by applying my math and computer science background, I could help things go well.” Today, Steinhardt is an...

Marking a breakthrough in the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), a team of researchers from UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco has unlocked a way to restore naturalistic speech for people with severe paralysis.

McKalee Steen traces her career in data science to her family's efforts toward environmental justice when the creek running through their farm in northeastern Oklahoma had been polluted by a chicken processing plant and was contaminating their well water. Her community fought to hold the company accountable, and a neighbor who was a scientist helped collect water samples, generating data that led to a legal...

Andy Konwinski, co-founder of Databricks, Perplexity, and Laude Ventures, will speak at UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) undergraduate commencement ceremonies on May 22.

Already ranked #1 in the country by U.S. News and World Report, UC Berkeley’s Data Science major has recently become the largest on campus. An average of 1,960 undergraduate students were declared in the major between fall 2024 and spring 2025.

At a February 27 lecture at UC Berkeley, Princeton economist Zachary Bleemer discussed his research on the impacts of policies at universities that restrict student enrollment in high-demand majors. After the lecture, he was joined in conversation by Benjamin Hermalin, Berkeley’s executive vice chancellor and provost.

UC Berkeley researchers in chemistry and computer science recently reported on their use of an AI tool – large language models – to advance discovery in reticular chemistry and materials science. The perspective paper was published in the journal Nature Reviews Materials earlier this month by researchers at the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP) and the Department of Chemistry at Berkeley...

Adam Yala made an excited call from Sweden to his PhD advisor at MIT when he first saw the study results in September 2019. Their research group’s artificial intelligence model for detecting patients at risk of breast cancer from mammogram images – developed and tested in Boston – had worked consistently on Swedish patient data, without any adjustments. When the same thing happened months later...

Two early-career faculty at UC Berkeley's College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) – Natacha Crooks and Song Mei – have been awarded prestigious 2025 Sloan Research Fellowships. The fellowship is granted annually to “honor exceptional researchers at U.S. and Canadian educational institutions whose creativity, innovation and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders,” according to the Sloan Foundation...

Chan was invited to campus to give the first inaugural CDSS Dean’s Distinguished Lecture on February 4 to a packed auditorium in Sutardja Dai Hall. His lecture – titled “Rethinking Clark Kerr: The uses of the university in the age of generative AI” – reflected on Kerr’s contributions and considered how to prepare today’s students for a world enabled by AI technologies.