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As a child growing up in Oakland, Miya Hayes remembers the prestige and allure that UC Berkeley represented in her community. Being one of the best academic institutions in the nation, it had a reputation for producing innovative research and changemaking leaders with global impact. Hayes, who hoped to attend Berkeley as an undergraduate, took advanced-level courses at the university in middle school and high...

How will emerging technologies shape the future of war and peace? How might a new era of strategic competition between superpowers complicate matters? What steps should governments take to mitigate the risks posed by autonomous technologies used in war? Many of the most important challenges that we face as we move into the 21st century involve problems for which we have no or little data...

Ron Cohen has recently been appointed the executive associate dean at UC Berkeley’s Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS). A distinguished professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Earth and Planetary Science, Cohen joins CDSS after completing two years of service with the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate in August, first as vice chair and then chair. Cohen was involved in the...

“In many ways, the Gateway is the crown jewel of our $6 billion Light the Way campaign,” said UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ at the Sept. 23 groundbreaking ceremony celebrating the initial phase of construction on the Gateway building. The event helped mark the start of Homecoming weekend, with students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents and guests participating as university leaders discussed the significance of a...

Imagine a technology that could remove planet-warming emissions from smokestacks, turn moisture in the air into drinking water and transform carbon dioxide into clean energy. A new UC Berkeley institute will bring together top machine learning and chemistry researchers to make this vision a reality, and a Bay Area foundation is providing a substantial gift to launch and enable this work at UC Berkeley over...

With the U.S. midterm elections approaching and political disinformation posing a continued threat to democracy, UC Berkeley’s ambitious new Our Better Web initiative is advancing efforts to study and combat online harms. The initiative, launched on a small scale in April, is releasing its first set of projects, including a look at the prevalence of content that promotes deception, discrimination and child exploitation. Other new...

Applications have opened for the UCSF-UC Berkeley Joint Program in Computational Precision Health’s (CPH) first Ph.D. cohort. “It’s one of the best computational schools in the world and one of the best medical schools in the world coming together to create this interdisciplinary ecosystem,” said Adam Yala, one of three assistant professors in the inaugural group of core faculty for the CPH program. Yala and...

A new UC Berkeley lab is building data tools that allow people without programming backgrounds to benefit from the latest computer science advances. The EPIC Data Lab – short for Effective Programming, Interaction, and Computation with Data–– is collaborating with end-users like public defenders to understand what important messy data challenges exist in their fields. The researchers use cutting-edge machine learning, data management and computer-aided...

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...