BIDS GraphXD 2021

Former BIDS Data Science Fellow Laura K. Nelson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern University. Laura uses computational methods and open source tools - principally automated text analysis - to study social movements, culture, gender, institutions, and organizations. She is particularly interested in developing computational tools that can bolster the way social scientists do inductive and theory-driven research. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and she also holds an MA from UC Berkeley and a BA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. While at UC Berkeley, she was a postdoctoral fellow with Digital Humanities @ Berkeley, developing a course for undergraduates on computational text analysis in the humanities and social sciences. 

Lauren Ponisio was a postdoctoral scholar in the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management department and a BIDS Data Science Fellow. She is currently an Assistant Professor at UC Riverside, where the Ponisio Lab studies the mechanisms operating in complex ecological communities in order to restore biodiversity in degraded ecosystems.

As a native of the Central Valley, Lauren has a personal connection to issues concerning the sustainability of agriculture, and a primary goal of my research is to make agricultural systems better for humans and wildlife. She thus also investigate strategies for designing agricultural systems to promote biodiversity conservation and the links between conservation strategies and improving livelihoods.

Lastly, she is working on the development team of NIMBLE, a system for building and sharing analysis methods for statistical models, especially for hierarchical models and computationally intensive methods. Statistics is the primary way scientists identify patterns within their data, and thus, advances in fields applying statistics are often facilitated by computational methods.

Niek Veldhuis is Professor of Assyriology (cuneiform studies) in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. He received his PhD at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (The Netherlands) in 1997, and came to Berkeley in 2002. His primary interests are in the intellectual history of ancient Mesopotamia (History of the Mesopotamian Lexical Tradition, 2014) and Sumerian literature (Religion, Literature and Scholarship: The Sumerian Composition Nanše and the Birds, 2004).  He is director of the NEH-supported Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts and is a member of the international Oracc Steering Committee, providing tools and standards for digital publication of cuneiform texts to scholars worldwide. Today, his main research focus is on developing computational text analysis scripts (primarily in Jupyter Notebooks) for cuneiform datasets.

Jarrod Millman, a former BIDS Data Science Fellow, is a PhD student in biostatistics  at UC Berkeley.  His research interests include algorithms, scientific computing, and neuroscience.

David Mongeau, now the Founding Director of the School of Data Science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, was the Executive Director of BIDS from April 2018 to June 2021. During that time, in collaboration with the Faculty Director and Faculty Council, he set strategic direction and oversaw the BIDS research, training, and outreach. He also led the institute’s industry and foundation relations and its engagement with other UC and global research institutes, all toward the overarching mission at BIDS to create and deploy data science methods, practices, and technologies to enable discovery. Previously, David co-led the data analytics institute at Ohio State; worked at Battelle, where he championed its proposal for an AI and cybersecurity company, now Covail; and worked for many years at Bell Labs – starting on the team that introduced the first C++ compiler and UNIX System V and leaving after building a global business and technology consulting practice, now part of Nokia Bell Labs Consulting. David earned his undergraduate degree at Carnegie Mellon University, and later earned a graduate degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MBA from Purdue University. Many of his interests lie beyond data science, embracing the humanities and arts.

Alex de Siqueira is a postdoctoral researcher at BIDS, working on open source algorithms for processing computed tomography (CT) 3D images. He received his MS and PhD from the State University of São Paulo, Brazil, applying image processing tools to tackle challenges in materials science and geochronology. A core developer of scikit-image, he is an open source and free software enthusiast since his first contact with Linux, in 2000, contributing to several projects and events in Latin America and Europe. Alex also worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the State University of Campinas, Brazil, and the TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Germany, where he created pytracks and wrote Octave - Your first steps on scientific programming (in Brazilian Portuguese).

Ross Barnowski is a postdoctoral scholar working towards the development of open, interactive tools for learning and teaching NumPy. Ross has been involved in open source software for reproducible, collaborative science since 2015, primarily in his role as an educator. He holds a PhD in nuclear engineering from UC Berkeley and previously served as an assistant research scientist and lecturer in the department of nuclear engineering, teaching the graduate-level lab in nuclear instrumentation. His post-graduate research focused on systems integration and software for 3D gamma-ray imaging systems including high-resolution instruments for applications in nuclear security and molecular imaging. He has also worked on hand-portable radiation imaging systems for real-time 3D radiation mapping with applications in environmental monitoring and nuclear contamination remediation. These systems have been used to investigate gamma-ray imaging for environmental monitoring in real-world scenarios, including the area around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as well as Chernobyl, Ukraine.

Adam G. Anderson advised graduate students in the Computational Social Science Training Program, managed the Computational Social Science Forum, and helped organize BIDS's cross-domain (XD) initiatives.  He was also a lecturer in Digital Humanities and Data Science, and an academic coordinator for Digital Humanities at Berkeley, where he co-authored and designed the Theory and Methods curriculum for the DigHum Minor and Certificate Program. He was also a co-coordinator for the Digital Humanities Working Group (DHWG) and the Computational Text Analysis Working Group (CTAWG), as well as the topic area lead in Network Analysis and Text Analysis at the D-Lab.  His work brings together the fields of computational linguistics, archaeology and Assyriology / Sumerology to quantify the social and economic landscapes emerging during the Bronze Age in the ancient Near East.  His research interests include network analysis, archival studies, geospatial mapping and language modeling (NLP).  He applies these mixed methods to large datasets of ancient texts and archaeological records, in order to better understand the lives of individuals and groups within ancient societies, and to relate these findings within the context of our lives today.  He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University, an MA (zwischenprüfung) in Assyriology from  Ludwig-Maximilians University, and a BA in Linguistics from Brigham Young University.

Douglas Guilbeault is an Assistant Professor in the Management of Organizations Group at the Haas School of Business. He studies how people learn, challenge, develop, and invent categories by communicating in social networks. This investigation extends to the analysis of how organizations mediate and augment social computation by enabling new forms of communication, coordination, and creativity. This investigation further extends into how the social construction of meaning can be shaped by various sources of influence, such as political messaging and the design of social media platforms. His work on these topics has appeared in a number of journals, including Nature Communications, The Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, Cognition, Policy and Internet, and The Journal of International Affairs, as well as in popular news outlets, such as The Atlantic and Wired. Guilbeault’s work has received top research awards from The International Conference on Computational Social Science, The Cognitive Science Society, and The International Communication Association. In addition, he was a recipient of Stanford’s “The Art of Science” award for the piece “Changing Views in Data Science over 50 Years” produced in collaboration with the research collective, comp-syn. Guilbeault teaches People Analytics at Haas, focusing on how organizations are using novel algorithmic methods to address (and sometimes inadvertently create) fundamental problems in management.

Marsha Fenner is the Communications/Program Manager for the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. In this role, she works to connect researchers and data science practitioners across a wide array of academic disciplines, facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, and implement training and education programs that engage and expand BIDS' and Berkeley’s active and diverse research community. Fenner has managed communications, training/education/outreach programs, and administrative operations for scientific programs and research initiatives at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, including the Innovative Genomics Institute, the DOE Joint Genome Institute, and Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source. She holds an MA in philosophy and comparative religious studies, and a BA in classics, philosophy and mathematics.