News

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...

The UC Board of Regents today voted to establish UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS), the campus’s first new college in more than 50 years. The college will develop, implement and share high-quality, ethics-oriented and accessible curricula, educating a diverse student body in data science, computing and statistics. It will also create new fields, applications and solutions to societal problems through...

UC Berkeley’s Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society will receive four grants to increase access to and awareness of data science, a California state initiative announced. The California Education Learning Lab grants will fund CDSS and partner institution efforts to expand data science curriculum and pipelines at state community colleges and UC Merced. CDSS will also be the lab’s cohort coordinator for other academic...

College of Engineering: The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced a sweeping effort to address risks and advance the science and technology and broad applications of artificial intelligence, involving universities across the nation. The $140 million investment will establish seven new National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes (AI Institutes). Five UC Berkeley faculty members will join one of the key institutions, the AI Institute for Agent-based...

College of Engineering: The National Science Foundation (NSF) recognized electrical engineering and computer sciences assistant professors Yakun Sophia Shao and Gireeja Ranade with Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards. The awards are part of NSF’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, which supports early-career faculty “who have the potential to serve as academic role models” and to become leaders in their field, according to...

When Alice Xie moved from China to California as a teenager, she experienced major culture shock. She understood the words people spoke, but conversations were still hard to follow. She often felt isolated and underestimated. Through art, Xie found a way to explore and communicate about this period in her life. So it was no surprise when she came to UC Berkeley and became an...

Safe, clean and affordable drinking water is a human right in California. But making that legal requirement a reality is a difficult challenge exacerbated further by climate change. Two water engineers believe artificial intelligence can help. Working with UC Berkeley’s Data Science Discovery program students, they are building a chatbot they hope will help California Water Resources Board staff discern, communicate and enforce rules to...

Berkeley News: John Schulman cofounded the ambitious software company OpenAI in December 2015, shortly before finishing his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley. At OpenAI, he led the reinforcement learning team that developed ChatGPT — a chatbot based on the company’s generative pre-trained (GPT) language models — which has become a global sensation, thanks to its ability to generate remarkably human-like...