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The COVID-Twitter Project, created by Ameek Bindra (Berkeley ‘22) and a team of undergraduates across the country, analyzes tweets about COVID-19 to map how reactions to the pandemic changed over the months. According to Ameek, the Discovery Exchange provided invaluable resources and guidance that helped the project come to fruition. (Note: responses modified for length) Discovery Exchange is a new initiative that originated from the...

The Discovery Exchange would not be possible without the people who helped make the online hub into what it is: a summer program that provides undergraduate students with the support, community, and resources to engage in data science research remotely. Among them is Arlo Malmberg, who facilitated and advised student research teams. [[{"fid":"1864","view_mode":"width_300","fields":{"format":"width_300","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"width_300","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"style":"float: left;","class":"media-element file-width-300","data-delta":"1"}}]] Question: What is your role in the Discovery Exchange program...

As the world faces the most profound and deeply disruptive public health crisis in modern history—COVID-19—our scientific research communities are navigating a series of unknowns against a complex backdrop where responsible data science is more important than ever, write four leading University of California, Berkeley experts in a recent paper. Published in the June 2020 Bulletin of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Data...

Spearheaded by four graduate students from the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy, Mapping for Environmental Justice (MEJ) integrates environmental, health, and socioeconomic data of US communities into a holistic and interactive public map. Similarly to CalEnviroScreen and the Washington Environmental Health Disparities Map Project, MEJ aims to identify disadvantaged communities and provide quantitative evidence that can help lobby for better resources and regulations...

COVID-19 has impeded many opportunities and has resulted in students feeling isolated and uninspired. To help students interested in data science stay motivated and connected through this difficult time, the UC Berkeley Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) piloted the Discovery Exchange, a free online hub (running from June 1 through August 14) that offers mentorship, workshops, and community to any Berkeley student...

The demand for data scientists continues to surge with advances in technology and medicine requiring the skills to analyze, store, and protect data. Data scientists topped LinkedIn’s “Emerging Jobs Report” over the last three years, reporting a 37% annual growth in the 2020 report. The demand is even exceeding the pool of trained data scientists, according to a 2019 Dataconomy report. UC Berkeley pioneered an...

The Spark + AI Summit 2020 is the largest gathering bringing together data teams in the Apache Spark™ community. As described by the Spark + AI Summit host, Databricks, the "s essions, and training will cover data engineering and data science content, along with best practices for productionizing AI — keeping training data fresh with stream processing, quality monitoring, testing, and serving models at a...

This article was written by Jae Yeon Kim, a computational social scientist and PhD candidate in Political Science at UC Berkeley.

Despite the difficult circumstances, student researchers in the UC Berkeley Data Science Discovery Research Program continue to push forward and work to come up with innovative solutions to the problems and issues they face, both with the situation of the current working environment and with the projects they work on. Members of two such teams, Data for Social Good (Elizabeth Leong, Jessica Rodriguez, Natasha Hellebrandt)...

Rent isn’t the only extreme price we pay to live in California. Natural disasters like wildfires, earthquakes, droughts, landslides, and floods are all too common, and increasingly so. Crises such as these, including the current coronavirus pandemic, rely heavily on donations to support affected communities. While cash donations are generally preferred by shelters and disaster relief agencies, donations of physical supplies are often necessary for...