Data Science, AI & Robotics News

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.

Videos of squirrels leaping from bendy branches across impossibly large gaps, parkouring off walls, scrambling to recover from tricky landings are not just more YouTube content documenting the antics of squirrels. Researchers at UC Berkeley are capturing video of squirrels as part of their research to understand the split-second decisions squirrels make to elude deadly predators, research that could help with development of robots with better agility and control.

The National Science Foundation has awarded $20 million over five years to the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Southern California to establish the National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Institute for Advances in Optimization. The award is among 11 new National AI Research Institutes announced today by NSF.

More than 700 imaging satellites are orbiting the earth, and every day they beam vast oceans of information to databases on the ground. There’s just one problem: Only those with considerable wealth and expertise can access it. Now, a UC Berkeley team has devised a machine learning system to tap the problem-solving potential of satellite imaging that could bring access and analytical power to researchers and governments worldwide.

Our understanding, planning, and response to wildfires benefit from connections with data and computing sciences. Recent developments in machine learning and simulations can help first responders detect fires earlier, predict fires’ paths and limit blazes quickly. Through collaborations with practitioners in other fields like microbiology and forest management, these tools are answering previously intractable questions about fires that can inform policy and practice.