BIDS Faculty Affiliates Josh Blumenstock (UC Berkeley School of Information) and Sameer Srivastava (UC Berkeley Haas School of Business) will be featured speakers at this year's DataEDGE 2022 conference, being presented by UC Berkeley's School of Information. This event brings together senior industry and academic leaders for a conversation about the challenges and opportunities created by the rise of big data.
Registration and Program information to be posted soon.
This year's keynote speaker will be Rumman Chowdhury, director of the META (Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability) team at Twitter. In this role, Chowdhury leads a team of applied researchers and engineers to identify and mitigate algorithmic harms on the platform. She is a pioneer in the field of applied algorithmic ethics, creating cutting-edge socio-technical solutions for ethical, explainable and transparent AI. She holds degrees in quantitative social science and has been a practicing data scientist and AI developer since 2013. She is interested in how data can be used to understand bias and ways to evaluate the impact of technology on humanity. She has contributed significant work on algorithmic ethics, fairness, and justice. Her latest research is on the surveillance infrastructure of smart cities, as well as the algorithmic colonization of the global south.
About DataEDGE:
- We have entered the era of big data. We can now access petabytes of transactions, clickstreams, media, archives, research, as well as data from social networks, mobile phones, and sensors. This data is growing exponentially — as is the technology to extract insights, discoveries, and meaning from it.
- Big data will transform every sector of the economy. Cloud storage and advanced software now offer professionals access to real-time data. Data-driven decision-making has already increased productivity in financial services and social media. Health care, public administration, retail, and manufacturing are poised to achieve similar growth as they harness the technologies underlying this data revolution.
- Data science has been dominated by computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians working in finance and information industries. But the tools for working with big data are improving fast, and a much wider range of sectors, including health care, manufacturing, and government, now recognize the value of data-driven decision making.
- We need a broader conception of the field — one that highlights not only technical skills for data collection, aggregation, and analysis but also the ability to frame a relevant problem, to derive insight from the data, and to visualize and communicate the findings and why they matter.
- Are you ready? Big data demands individuals with the technical skill to aggregate huge amounts of data, the analytical skill to understand it, and the design and storytelling skill to synthesize it. Silicon Valley businesses are already struggling to find qualified data scientists. This talent shortage will intensify as mainstream businesses seek managers fluent in the language and tools of big data to extract value from their un-mined stores of data.
- What skills do you and your organization need to thrive in a data-intensive economy? What skills will all professionals need to succeed in the era of big data? What balance of technical, social science, and design skills will we expect of a new generation of data scientists? What tools must educators master to train professionals to extract insights, products, and services from enormous databases? How do we protect privacy and security when almost every move we make, mouse we click, and dollar we spend is captured as data?
- Join the conversation. The DataEDGE conference at UC Berkeley will bring together senior industry and academic leaders for a conversation about the challenges and opportunities created by the rise of big data.
For more information about the DataEDGE conference, email dataedge@ischool.berkeley.edu.
Speaker(s)
Joshua Blumenstock
BIDS Faculty Council Member Joshua Blumenstock is an Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, the Director of the Data-Intensive Development Lab and the Global Policy Lab, and the Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Effective Global Action. His research lies at the intersection of machine learning and development economics, and focuses on using novel data and methods to better understand the causes and consequences of global poverty. Joshua has a PhD in Information Science and a MA in Economics from UC Berkeley, and Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Physics from Wesleyan University. He is a recipient of the Intel Faculty Early Career Honor, a Gates Millennium Grand Challenge award, a Google Faculty Research Award, and the U.C. Berkeley Chancellor's Award for Public Service. His work has appeared in a variety of publications including Science, Nature, the American Economic Review, and the proceedings of KDD, NeurIPS, and AAAI.
Sameer B. Srivastava
Sameer B. Srivastava is Associate Professor and Harold Furst Chair in Management Philosophy and Values at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, and he is also affiliated with UC Berkeley Sociology. His research unpacks the complex interrelationships among the culture of social groups, the cognition of individuals within these groups, and the connections that people forge within and across groups. Much of his work is set in organizational contexts, where he uses computational methods to examine how culture, cognition, and networks relate to career outcomes. His work has been published in journals such as American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, and Organization Science. It has been covered in media outlets such as The New York Times, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Forbes. Sameer co-directs the Berkeley-Stanford Computational Culture Lab and the Berkeley Culture Initiative.