Data Science

Researchers from Stanford University and UC Berkeley report in today’s edition ofScience that door-to-door canvassing by volunteers — both transgender and not — reduced voters’ prejudice against transgender people.

Three faculty members have been selected as 2016-17 Signatures Innovation Fellows, receiving as much as $100,000 per year each for up to two years to pursue commercially promising data science and software projects.

UC Berkeley scientists are releasing an Android app with the goal of creating a worldwide seismic detection network that could eventually warn users of impending jolts from nearby quakes.

To Michael Jordan, the smart way to extract and analyze key information embedded in mountains of “Big Data” is to ignore most of it. Instead, zero in on collections of small amounts of data.

From Apple’s Siri to Honda’s robot Asimo, machines seem to be getting better and better at communicating with humans. But some neuroscientists caution that today’s computers will never truly understand what we’re saying.

Joe Hellerstein and his students developed a new programming model for distributed computing which MIT Technology Review named one of the 10 technologies “most likely to change our world”.

The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, in partnership with CITRIS and BIDS, will be hosting an info session for prospective applicants to the Signatures Innovation Fellows Program on Wednesday, December 9.

The AMP Lab, launched in 2011 by Michael Franklin and colleagues in computer science, has already had an outsized impact on industry. 

A supercomputer simulation of a mere 10 milliseconds in the collapse of a massive star into a neutron star proves that these catastrophic events, often called hypernovae, can generate the enormous magnetic fields needed to explode the star and fire off bursts of gamma rays visible halfway across the universe.

Bin Yu’s statistical strategies work hand in hand with intense computation to penetrate storms of data.

UC Berkeley is teaming up with UC San Diego and the University of Washington to lead one of four regional “brain trusts” in data science established by the National Science Foundation.

The average person will suffer economic harm, often dramatic harm, by 2100 if  climate change continues on its current course, new research shows.

Jasjeet Sekhon, a Signatures Innovation Fellow, has developed statistical approaches and new algorithms to provide simpler and much cheaper ways to assess the effectiveness of persuasion strategies.

Alexei Pozdnoukhov, a Signatures Innovation Fellow, leads research to use cellular data to aid traffic planning and operations. Fully developed, the technology could aid both traffic control and planning to keep pace with changes in transportation habits.

In a perfect world, we’d also have an early-warning system to give us vital seconds to protect ourselves and our family from harm when the shaking starts.

The San Francisco Bay Area’s transformation into a sprawling, exclusive and high-income community with less and less room for its low-income residents is just beginning, according to UC Berkeley researchers who literally have it all mapped out.

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founder, internet investor Yuri Milner, have signed a contract with UC Berkeley to lead a major escalation in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI.

A powerful, interactive tool popular among academics and scientists who wrestle with large datasets in multiple formats is getting a big infusion of support to broaden its capabilities for collaborative data science and to reach ever wider audiences.

UC Berkeley seismologists were surprised last August to see a dramatic increase in faint tremors occurring under the San Andreas Fault near Parkfield, in Central California, about 10 hours after a magnitude 6.0 earthquake struck Napa

In an effort to support UC Berkeley faculty interested in commercial applications of their research, UC Berkeley is launching a new program in the data science and software areas. The new Signatures Innovation Fellows program was recently established with the generous support of UC Berkeley alumnus Bobby Yazdani.

Shawn Shadden integrates diagnostic imaging with computational modeling to better diagnose stroke severity in patients. 

An international collaboration including Neil Davies, Director of UC Berkeley's Gump Station, is preparing to create a digital representation of of the Pacific island of Moorea to create a virtual lab to test and hypothesize the impact of human activities. 

UC Berkeley’s new Center for Long-Term CyberSecurity will map out what the cybersecurity problem will mean a few years down the road, and to stimulate interdisciplinary research efforts that will make a difference in resolving the threat.

Three professors at UC Berkeley will receive $1.5 million over the next five years from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation as part of the foundation’s Data-Driven Discovery Initiative. The initiative, one of the largest privately funded data scientist programs of its kind, is committed to enabling new types of scientific breakthroughs by supporting interdisciplinary, data-driven researchers.

Scientists at the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory were alerted 10 seconds before Sunday morning’s 6.0 magnitude temblor on the Napa Fault, courtesy of the ShakeAlert earthquake early-warning system.

The White House has given a public nod to a ground-breaking UC Berkeley air-monitoring project and its new collaboration with a Colorado public media platform, which aims to build a citizen-science story-corps to help monitor carbon emissions in the Bay Area.

A photo is worth a thousand words, but what if the image could also represent a thousands of other images? New software developed by UC Berkeley computer scientists seeks to tame the sea of visual data in the world by generating a single photo that can represent massive clusters of images.

Despite a deluge of new information about the diversity and distribution of plants and animals around the globe, “big data” has yet to make a mark on conservation efforts to preserve the planet’s biodiversity. But that may soon change.

Measuring the nation’s economic health has long been a slow, costly and imprecise exercise, but researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have helped develop a new way to measure real-time consumer behavior that could vastly improve economic policymaking.

Trolling for real-world solutions to support ocean fisheries, the U.S. State Department sponsored a “Fishackathon” at five sites across the country. A team from UC Berkeley’s School of Information, working out of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, took home the national grand prize for a mobile app designed to help West African fishermen.

UC Berkeley computer theorists have identified an algorithm to describe the strategy used by genes during sexual recombination. In doing so, they address the dueling evolutionary forces of survival of the fittest and of diversity.

Paul Waddell, a city planning professor at the University of California, Berkeley, with a penchant for conducting research with what he calls his “big urban data,” is putting his work to a real-world test in San Francisco.

Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, Romania, Turkey and several other seismically active countries operate early warning systems - but not the United States. Although the technology is available along the west coast and a demonstration system is operating, a public alert system does not exist.

Students were invited recently to develop a compelling user interface to the Bancroft Library’s FSM Digital Archive, and shared their results 12 days later before a panel of judges. It’s hoped that HackFSM will spur future efforts to make online collections more accessible and useful to scholars and the public.

Solomon Hsiang's research provides a “ground–level” view of climate’s current and likely future role in such social stresses as child mortality, crime and social upheaval.

Ben Recht was recently honored by the White House with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, recognizing some of the most promising young researchers.

Astronomers for the first time have peered into the heart of an exploding star in the final minutes of its existence. The feat is one of the primary goals of NASA’s NuSTAR mission.

A throng turned out for Thursday’s high-spirited launch of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. Designed to help researchers across the disciplines harness data in order to spur discoveries and create knowledge, the center for data-related teaching and collaboration will be housed in Doe Library.

NASA’s Kepler space telescope, now crippled and its four-year mission at an end, nevertheless provided enough data to answer its main research question: How many of the 200 billion stars in our galaxy have potentially habitable planets?

Although California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill last week to create a statewide earthquake early warning system, the United States is still behind the curve in embracing technology that has proven to save lives, lessen damage and speed recovery after a major quake.

Android smartphone users will soon have a chance to participate in important scientific research every time they charge their phones.

Saul Perlmutter, astrophysicist at the Berkeley Lab and Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley, is profiled in The Guardian's "Rational Hero" series.

Berkeley Lab scientists create atomic-scale structure of ribosome attached to a molecule that controls its motion

Like bugs? Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes at natural history museums? Interested in helping scientists understand our changing environment? These are just some of the reasons why people should join a project led by UC Berkeley’s Essig Museum of Entomology.

Thomas Immel and his team at the Space Sciences Lab will design, build and operate two instruments and oversee development of two others to be loaded on a solar-powered satellite for a two-year science mission tentatively set to launch in 2017.

Any way you count it, the fastest-growing major at UC Berkeley by far is one that long slumbered in obscurity: statistics.

Instead of typing your password, in the future you may only have to think your password, according to School of Information researchers. A new study explores the feasibility of brainwave-based computer authentication as a substitute for passwords.

UC Berkeley’s Ken Goldberg, Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, is featured in The Atlantic for his recent work, Bloom - “an Internet-based earthwork”.

Population and car numbers continue to increase, which means more frustrating hours spent in gridlock, more money lost on wasted energy, and more air pollution.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported on the work of Richard M. Allen, Director of the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, for helping to develop an early warning system that flashes imminent danger when a damaging earthquake is about to strike.

A tiny laser that could enable smaller and faster smart phones and tablets. A glucosamine-like supplement that targets the underlying cause of multiple sclerosis. These are among research projects getting a boost this year from a UC grants program.

Researchers at UC Berkeley and the City College of New York are using lasers to control the spin state of semiconductor materials, a development that could lead to the creation of even faster and smaller electronic devices. The researchers hope to see spintronics move beyond memory devices to the logic circuits that are the heart of modern computers.

Using ultrafast lasers, Berkeley Lab scientists have tackled the long-standing mystery of how Cooper pairs form in high-temperature superconductors. With pump and probe pulses spaced just trillionths of a second apart, the researchers used photoemission spectroscopy to map rapid changes in electronic states across the superconducting transition.

Chemist Berend Smit and colleagues are working with the power industry to find the best materials to capture and sequester carbon dioxide.

UC Berkeley plant biologist Chelsea Specht is part of a unique collaboration to develop software that visualizes enormous amount of data across all of life, allowing scientists to see, at a glance, how organisms are related. The effort is supported by a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Advances in materials science and electrical engineering have paved the way for a new type of electronic device: one that can bend and fold just like a piece of paper. Ana Claudia Arias, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, hopes to take this innovation to the next level. Her goal: "wearable electronics."

Berkeley Lab researchers and their colleagues demonstrate unique new materials for innovative electronic and magnetic applications

A fleet of 100 floating robots took a trip down the Sacramento Riveron Wednesday in a field test organized by UC Berkeley engineers. The devices, equipped with GPS-enabled smartphones, demonstrated the next generation of water monitoring technology.

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are working on a project that would modernize the grid and essentially bring it into the Internet age by using automated control software to manage demand in real time.

Establishing a new research institute at a top-tier university is a major undertaking that required a great deal of teamwork to pull off. In a recent interview, Richard Karp, founding director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, gave the inside story on how it all came together.

The Simons Foundation has awarded a landmark $60 million grant to UC Berkeley to establish a theory of computing institute that promises to catalyze new advances in broad disciplines that affect our everyday lives, from how we spend our money to how we fight disease.

Web-based startup Politify earned $20,000 for its first-place finish in the information technology category of the 2012 Big Ideas @ Berkeley innovation contest.

Text messaging often gets a bad rap for contributing to illiteracy and high-risk behavior such as reckless driving. But a Berkeley social-welfare professor has found an upside to texting, especially for people who feel stressed out, isolated and alone.

The blogging community is more racially diverse than one might think. Internet-connected African Americans are more likely to blog than their white and Hispanic counterparts, according to new research from UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley engineers, led by computer scientist Ras Bodik, will join the University of Pennsylvania and seven other research institutions in a project to make computer programming faster, easier and more intuitive.

The quest to capture the massive amounts of data being produced in our world has gotten a $10 million boost, via a National Science Foundation award to UC Berkeley.

At Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, scientists have provided the first experimental determination of the pathways by which electrical charge is transported from molecule-to-molecule in an organic thin film.

UC Berkeley scientists are tapping the cognitive smarts of babies, toddlers and preschoolers to program computers to think more like humans.

Neuroscientists have shown that the same brain processes used to learn new motor skills are also necessary to master abstract skills, or controlling a robotic arm using brain activity alone.

Berkeley Lab mathematicians James Sethian and Robert Saye have won the 2011 Cozzarelli Prize for the best scientific paper in the category of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu joined UC and Lawrence Berkeley Lab leaders to break ground on the lab’s new Computational Research and Theory facility.

UC Berkeley astronomer Chung-Pei Ma, graduate student Nicholas McConnell and colleagues have discovered the largest black holes to date ‑- two monsters with masses equivalent to 10 billion suns that are threatening to consume anything, even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system.

Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one’s own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, UC Berkeley scientists are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers.

UC Berkeley engineers have shown that by using ferroelectric materials, they can pump up the charge accumulated at a capacitor for a given voltage, a phenomenon called negative capacitance. The achievement could reduce the power draw of today’s electronics, and break the bottleneck that has stalled improvements in computer clock speed.

Photos and observations posted to the website of the Global Amphibian BioBlitz now cover more than 700 species: 10 percent of the world’s frog, toad and salamander species that the social networking effort hopes to track. This success has now spawned a Reptile BioBlitz.

Skywatchers should get their binoculars and telescopes ready. Scientists at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab caught a supernova soon after its explosion. The supernova, located in the Big Dipper constellation, is appearing brighter than any other supernova of its type in the last 30 years. Earthlings might even be able to see it with good binoculars in 10 days’ time.

UC Berkeley is leading an effort to take information on the vertebrate collections in museums around the world and store it in the cloud for easy use by researchers and citizen scientists alike.

Pieter Abbeel, a UC Berkeley, professor known for his novel work in the field of machine learning in robotics – including robots that can fold laundry – has been named to a prestigious list of 35 of the world’s top young innovators by Technology Review magazine.

I-School student volunteers who evaluated a Disabled Students Program pilot test, which provided Livescribe computerized pens to students with learning disabilities, found that the smartpens had effects that extended well beyond note-taking abilities.

The NSF has launched a massive five-year, $121 million project involving 17 institutions, including UC Berkeley, to bring advanced digital services to the nation’s scientists and engineers. Collectively known as the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), the new project replaces the TeraGrid, which for 10 years provided researchers with computational and data resources in an open infrastructure to support scientific discovery.

Information theory dictates that a logical operation in a computer must consume a minimum amount of energy. Today’s computers consume a million times more energy per operation than this limit, but magnetic computers with no moving electrons could theoretically operate at the minimum energy, called the Landauer limit, according to UC Berkeley electrical engineers.

In early May, Intel announced a radical new transistor design: a 3D device that will enable the production of integrated-circuit chips that operate faster with less power. The breakthrough has its roots in research begun in 1997 by a team led by Berkeley electrical engineers Chenming Hu, Jeff Bokor and Tsu-Jae King Liu.

UC Berkeley researchers have shown that graphene, a one-atom-thick layer of crystallized carbon, can be tuned electrically to modify the amount of photons absorbed. This ability to switch light on and off is the fundamental characteristic of a network modulator, opening the door to optical computing in handheld electronics.

Researchers at UC Berkeley and UCSF have launched the joint Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses to develop technology that can translate brain signals into movements controlling prosthetic limbs, circumventing damaged or missing neural circuits in people suffering from disabling conditions.

Can mobile phone–based information improve the lives of farmers in the developing world? A research project — led by School of Information assistant professor Tapan Parikh and funded by the National Science Foundation — aims to address this question.

UC Berkeley engineers have found a way to grow nanolasers directly onto a silicon surface, an achievement that could lead to a new class of faster, more efficient microprocessors, as well as to powerful biochemical sensors that use optoelectronic chips.

Berkeley Lab researchers have carried out the first experimental demonstration of GRIN plasmonics, a hybrid technology that opens the door to a wide range of exotic optics, including superfast photonic computers, ultra-powerful optical microscopes, and “invisibility” carpet-cloaking devices.

Eric Brewer, UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, is the 2009 recipient of the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences, a prestigious honor that comes with a $150,000 prize.