News

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...

Sam Pottinger spent years turning the latest advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning into models and dashboards that supported decision-making at Silicon Valley technology companies. At UC Berkeley, he's building those kinds of tools to turn quality environmental science into accessible, actionable information. That's the idea behind the new Global Plastic Policy Tool, an open-source, interactive model where users can explore regionalized data about...

Over the past decade, AI has permeated nearly every corner of science: Machine learning models have been used to predict protein structures, estimate the fraction of the Amazon rainforest that has been lost to deforestation and even classify faraway galaxies that might be home to exoplanets. But while AI can be used to speed scientific discovery — helping researchers make predictions about phenomena that may...

Catherine Cronquist Browning has been named assistant dean of educational programs and new initiatives at UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS). She started Nov. 1 in the newly created role, drawing on 18 years of relevant experience at Berkeley. “I’ve been a lecturer, a graduate student and a staff member on campus. I’ve been in a central campus unit, a graduate...