Data Science, AI & Robotics News

Plenoxels surpass NeRF in every way — from their speed to their image quality — which may broaden their potential for consumer, industry and scientific applications.

For years, UC Berkeley snow hydrologist Manuela Girotto has combined disparate remote sensing datasets from satellites into models to understand snow as a water resource. In an era of extreme drought and climate change, her work is increasingly urgent. A recent rapid expansion of available observations from space could unlock important insights. But integrating that amount of data into researchers’ existing models is difficult. So when Berkeley computer science doctoral candidate Colorado Reed reached out asking how artificial intelligence could help, she saw an opportunity.

UC Berkeley formally launched this week The Sky Computing Lab aimed at establishing a two-sided market mediated by services that identify and harness for users the best combination of compatible clouds for their needs and building a new backbone for interconnected cloud computing, a milestone that would revolutionize the industry.

To find out how much interest there is in at-home medication abortions, researchers from UC Berkeley analyzed Google searches during 2020—the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic—to determine the extent to which people searched for out-of-clinic medication abortions in the U.S. through three initial search terms: home abortion, self abortion, and buy abortion pill online.

The number of people leaving California for other states appears to have slowed during the last quarter of 2021, while the number of people moving into the state appears to be rebounding, according to new estimates released today by the nonpartisan California Policy Lab (CPL) using credit-bureau data through the end of 2021.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest scientific and educational computing society, has awarded UC Berkeley professor Pieter Abbeel the 2021 ACM Prize in Computing for his foundational work in robot learning.

A new research center at the University of California, Berkeley, funded by alumni Eric and Wendy Schmidt, will tackle major environmental challenges including climate change and biodiversity loss by combining data science and environmental science.

Significant advances in artificial intelligence (AI) over the past decade have relied upon extensive training of algorithms using massive, open-source databases. But when such datasets are used “off label” and applied in unintended ways, the results are subject to machine learning bias that compromises the integrity of the AI algorithm, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Texas at Austin.

UC Berkeley-led researchers used mobile phone data and machine learning to quickly and accurately direct the Togolese government’s COVID-19 cash assistance to its poorest residents in a first-of-its-kind study published March 16 in Nature.

Leveraging support from the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), a team of researchers in the Computing Sciences Area has developed a new software tool for conducting hyperparameter optimization (HPO) of deep neural networks while taking into account the prediction uncertainty that arises from using stochastic optimizers for training the models.

UC Berkeley announced that the campus will be home to a new Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public, which, alongside a second center at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, will connect scientists, ethicists, social scientists, science communicators and the public in necessary and intentional discussions about the potential impacts of scientific discoveries.

The University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco, today (Oct. 20, 2021) jointly launched a new, one-of-a-kind program in computational precision health, a significant step toward advancing this new field and, ultimately, improving the quality and equity of health care.