News

UC Berkeley experts taught ChatGPT how to quickly create datasets on difficult-to-aggregate research about certain materials that can be used to fight climate change, according to a new paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. These datasets on the synergy of the highly-porous materials known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) will inform predictive models. The models will accelerate chemists’ ability to create or...

Stuart Russell, a computer science professor at UC Berkeley, recently testified at the U.S. Senate hearing titled “Oversight of A.I.: Principles for Regulation.” The Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law hosted the July 25 hearing. Russell said artificial general intelligence – a significant milestone where AI could independently learn and complete tasks like human beings – could offer significant...

Just a few years ago, Berkeley engineers showed us how they could easily turn images into a 3D navigable scene using a technology called Neural Radiance Fields, or NeRF. Now, another team of Berkeley researchers has created a development framework to help speed up NeRF projects and make this technology more accessible to others. Led by Angjoo Kanazawa, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer...

UC Berkeley researchers have designed an extreme-weather proven, hand-held device that can extract and convert water molecules from the air into drinkable water using only ambient sunlight as its energy source, a study published in Nature Water today shows. This atmospheric water harvester used an ultra-porous material known as a metal-organic framework (MOF) to extract water repeatedly in the hottest and driest place in North...

California allocated $6.87 million in its 2023-24 budget to UC Berkeley to develop the Police Records Access Project, a first-of-its-kind, state-wide database of police misconduct and use-of-force records. Berkeley’s Institute for Data Science, Graduate School of Journalism and partners will collect, curate and make accessible records that a 2019 state law unlocked for the public. It will help communities, journalists, public defenders, prosecutors, and police...

Through project-based programs, students learn how data science can help solve real-world problems, said Ashley Atkins, West Big Data Innovation Hub executive director. They gain skills like how to communicate about data to people with non-technical backgrounds, and they see in practice how to consider ethics and the impact of their choices on society, she said. DataJam, the University of Washington’s Data Science for Social...

Berkeley News: Over 1,200 computer hackers from around the world packed UC Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union last weekend during a 36-hour artificial intelligence (AI) learning language model (LLM) hackathon that Berkeley leaders say was the largest event of its kind. Dubbed “the Woodstock of Hackathons,” the event was hosted by Berkeley’s premiere startup accelerator, Berkeley SkyDeck, and Cal Hacks, a nonprofit that...

People participating in augmented and virtual realities are sharing significantly more information than previously understood through their motion data, two new UC Berkeley-led studies show. Users can be reliably identified using just minutes of their head and hand movements, researchers found. Movement data, which is collected and shared with companies and other players to fuel these worlds, can be used to infer dozens of details...

UC Berkeley, Tuskegee University and UC Merced are creating an interdisciplinary, introductory computing and social science course under recently awarded grants from the National Science Foundation. Students won’t need coding experience before they take this class, a common barrier to entry for students who want to try computer science for the first time in college. The class will also teach computing through a data lens...

Kanchana Samala’s mom saw her potential as a data scientist before Kanchana did. Her mom took a class and saw parallels between then high school-aged Kanchana who wanted to constantly learn new things and the field that seemed to never find the same story in data twice. This month, Samala graduated with a UC Berkeley data science degree, a job at The Gap and a...