BIDS is home to interdisciplinary programs and initiatives, led by a team who engages with faculty, researchers, developers, students, and industry.
- Research: Support for faculty, staff, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate/undergraduate research in a variety of fields in the life, health, social, and physical sciences, the humanities, and in computer science, statistics, and applied mathematics.
- Software: Contributions to a number of open source, open science, and open data resource communities in support of academic research.
- Training: A commitment to augment degree programs and provide valuable, accessible resources that expand collaboration opportunities for the campus community.
Overview of Programs & Initiatives
Read our 2025 Annual Report!
- Open Source Program Office (OSPO) - Integrates existing open source programs at BIDS from the Python and Jupyter ecosystems, and is part of the University of California OSPO network.
- Scientific Python - An international, community-owned initiative that coordinates a thriving ecosystem built on core libraries such as NumPy, SciPy, and matplotlib, with domain-stacks like Scikit-HEP for particle physics and PySAL for spatial data science providing specialized workflows.
- JupyterHealth - An open source platform that supports seamless integration and real-time data processing, allowing for personalized treatment pathways and significantly enhanced research capabilities and patient care outcomes.
- GeoJupyter - An open and collaborative community-driven initiative that reimagines geospatial interactive computing experiences for education, research, and industry. Led by the teams at BIDS and the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science & Environment (DSE).
- JupyterHub - Democratizes creating and accessing customized interactive computing environments by providing secure, scalable, and user-friendly platforms that enable individuals, teams, and organizations to explore data, develop code, and advance knowledge without barriers.
- Cultural Analytics - Develops and refines computational methods to interrogate human cultural production. A joint initiative between BIDS, the UC Berkeley Humanities Faculty, and the UC Berkeley School of Information.
- California Police Records Access Project - As part of the CLEAN initiative, the Police Records Access Project is groundbreaking work that created a comprehensive state-wide database detailing police misconduct and use-of-force incidents, developed in partnership with nine organizations.
- Graduate Training Programs
- Computational Social Science (CSS) - Trains predoctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, including demography, public health, public policy, social epidemiology, social welfare, and sociology.
- Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System (CRELS) - Trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics.
