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On January 21, the UC Berkeley School of Information (I School) recognized more than 100 summer and fall 2017 graduates with their families at the winter commencement. It was an intimate ceremony despite the online nature of the school’s Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS) program, moving some online students to reflect on their accomplishments.  “I feel like I’ve been baptized,” said Michael Rubin. “The honor of working and learning with this collection of bright and energetic minds … was entirely mine.”  Another student, Geoff Stirling, commented on how the program has seeped into his family life — in a positive way. “Our […]

“White hat” hackers, the good guys in the hacking universe, have become essential players in global cybersecurity, especially in the private sector. How can the government learn from the private sector when it comes to cybersecurity, and what challenges do they face in working with the good guys?

This past October, prospective and current MIDS students gathered for a Meet & Greet in downtown Denver, Colorado — an opportunity to make connections offline, seek advice on balancing educational and personal priorities and share expertise in the field of data science.

Contributing Author: Dr. Michael Tamir Whether you knew it or not, you’ve probably been taking advantage of the benefits of machine learning for years. Most would find it hard to go a full day without using at least one app or web service driven by machine learning. Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, and, of course, Google all have been using machine learning algorithms to drive searches, recommendations, targeted advertising, and more for well over a decade. In recent years, letting algorithms sort through a company’s data to find out how to optimize a business has become the rule rather than the exception. […]

The Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS) program at the UC Berkeley School of Information (I School) culminates with a synthetic capstone project. One capstone team consisting of MIDS students Nicholas Hamlin External link , Natarajan Krishnaswami External link , Glenn Dunmire External link , and Minhchau Dang External link  came together to create AidSight External link . AidSight is a platform that uses modern data science techniques to make the 600,000 aid activities reported to the International Aid Transparency Initiative External link  (IATI) understandable and digestible at a glance. The AidSight team took some time to answer a few questions we had about the impact their platform is having on the global aid and funding community.

On December 19th, the fall 2016 datascience@berkeley graduates presented their capstone projects in a public webinar. For the capstone project, the graduates were tasked to solve a real-world situation or problem utilizing their data science skills in communication, problem-solving, influence, and management to provide a fully realized solution.

Machine learning continues to deepen its impact with new platforms that enable more efficient and accurate analysis of big data. One such platform is Apache SystemML External link , which allows for large-scale learning on the underlying Apache Spark External link  platform, while maintaining the simple, modular, high-level mathematics at the core of the field. In a recent webinar, Mike Dusenberry External link , an engineer at the IBM Spark Technology Center External link  presented the work he and his team are doing to create a deep learning library for SystemML and solve for performant deep learning at scale. Here, we’ll provide the key points that Mike discussed, as well as additional resources for further exploration.