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Artificial intelligence was called “the buzzword of 2023” by CNN and referenced by countless media reports. The technology became increasingly visible in society as business leaders used it to restructure workplaces, people chose it as their romantic partners, criminals used it to cloud the public’s sense of reality and more. AI has enabled striking scientific and technological breakthroughs for previously intractable problems. At UC Berkeley...

Kristen Williams has been selected as assistant dean for development and external relations and executive director of individual giving at UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS). She started in the new role on Jan. 3. Williams is a successful fundraising professional with nearly 20 years of experience at Berkeley, having served as assistant dean for external relations most recently at the...

UC Berkeley’s Omar Yaghi has been awarded the renowned Science for the Future Ernest Solvay Prize by Syensqo. The award honors chemistry leaders whose discoveries are shaping the future of the field and humanity. Yaghi is being recognized for pioneering reticular materials that can help combat the impacts of climate change, Syensqo announced. The ultra porous materials – known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent...

The computer science, data science and statistics undergraduate majors leading to Bachelor of Arts degrees are now administered by UC Berkeley’s first new college in more than 50 years. Following university approval in December, the College of Letters & Science transferred these majors and a statistics minor to the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. The new college will oversee these programs as part...

Nearly 70 years after the launch of the first satellite, we still have more questions than answers about space. But a team of Berkeley researchers is on a mission to change this with a proposal to build a fleet of low-cost, autonomous spacecraft, each weighing only 10 grams and propelled by nothing more than the pressure of solar radiation. These miniaturized solar sails could potentially...

Karthik Shekhar and his colleagues raised a few eyebrows as they collected cow and pig eyes from Boston butchers, but those eyes — eventually from 17 separate species, including humans — are providing insights into the evolution of the vertebrate retina and could lead to better animal models for human eye diseases. The retina is a miniature computer containing diverse types of cells that collectively...

UC Berkeley’s first new college in more than 50 years has launched a fund to support innovation in computing, data science and statistics that will benefit society. Contributions secured by the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) Dean’s Innovation Fund will advance data science education and research in line with the vision of Jennifer Chayes, dean of the new college. The college’s mission...

Agile Metabolic Health aims to revolutionize the patient experience for millions of people with diabetes, catalyzing a new frontier of open-source, data-driven personalized healthcare. This initial project could help the more than 38 million Americans who are diagnosed with diabetes. But the college’s vision is much bigger. It aims to do much more than improve diabetes care. What the college is building in partnership with...

There’s a quote attributed to Stephen McCranie that makes the rounds on social media every now and then: “The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.” The idea is that the learning process demands failure. That’s what the grading system known as “mastery learning” seeks to facilitate: a process that gives students more room to learn from their mistakes. Students advance...

A heat wave two years ago in the Pacific Northwest made headlines, breaking temperature records and earning the description “historic and dangerous” by the National Weather Service. It made two UC Berkeley scientists ask: How hot could it possibly get? They answered the question with a new theory: how hot the surface temperature can get is linked to how hot it is five or six...