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Staff, faculty and partners of UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) celebrated the college’s inaugural school year at a picnic last week. Standing on the Campanile Esplanade in the center of campus, CDSS Dean Jennifer Chayes thanked the more than 130 attendees for their help in making CDSS the first new college at Berkeley in more than 50 years. Guests wearing...

As students and faculty return to campus for the beginning of a new academic year, the newest college at UC Berkeley is working to build its student support infrastructure and programs. The College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) was formally approved by the UC Board of Regents in May, putting into effect an array of activity over the summer that will continue into...

UC Berkeley researchers launched a pioneering interdisciplinary training program this week that will blend criminal justice and computer science in ways that experts say will help reduce long-standing, systemic inequities in the criminal legal system. The program, called Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System (CRELS), is being made possible with a $3-million National Science Foundation grant. Launched by a multidisciplinary research team that...

UC Berkeley College of Engineering: Emerging speech neuroprostheses may offer a way to communicate for people who are unable to speak due to paralysis or disease, but fast, high-performance decoding has not yet been demonstrated. Now, transformative new work by researchers at UCSF and UC Berkeley shows that more natural speech decoding is possible using the latest advances in artificial intelligence. Led by UCSF neurosurgeon...

In 2016, political pundits were stunned by the presidential election results. Donald J. Trump would be the next president of the United States, defying most political pundits’ predictions. This prompted the media, politicians and others to reflect on the accuracy and usefulness of election forecasting. Heading into the 2024 presidential election cycle, we spoke with Lakshya Jain, an election forecaster and UC Berkeley computer science...

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...

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...