Comp Sci / Stats / Math
BIDS Machine Shop
As more scientific fields move to intersect with computation, a need arises for software tools that can bridge the gap between the matter under investigation and computational principles/software engineering. Many scientists are specialists trained in their respective domains, so finding... more
Computational imaging and microscopy
Participants in this project are building new microscopes that use computation to do things that microscopes normally can't, like 3D imaging, gigapixel imaging or phase imaging. This undergraduate internship project is seeking motivated interns with either (or both) of the following... more
Data Science Studies
Garbage In, Garbage Out? Do Machine Learning Research Papers Report Where Training Data Comes From?
Supervised machine learning is widely used across fields, but major issues are arising around biased, inaccurate, and incomplete training data. In this project, we investigate to what extent published machine learning application papers give specific details about the training data they used,... more
The Visible and Invisible Work of Maintaining Open Source Software
Open-source software (OSS) project are now widely used across academia, industry, government, and non-profits, but many of these projects are heavily or extensively developed and maintained by volunteers. In this project, we investigate the visible and invisible work that project maintainers do to... more
Earth Sciences
Detecting change in global biodiversity through large scale network analysis
Global ecosystems that support life are undergoing dramatic pressure and rapid, unprecedented changes. Currently, there are a variety of separate scientific models, each with separate data sources, that can model the activities of diverse parts in an ecosystem, such as soil, bacteria-root... more
Hydrologic forecasting for the East River, CO
River flow forecasting is essential for planning reservoir operations, defense strategies against flooding, and fluvial ecosystems management plans. However, flow forecasting is a highly uncertain science. One of the biggest uncertainties lies in resolving the timescales over which water is stored... more
Hydrological forecasting and the water/energy nexus
Clean, available water is a critical and often-overlooked resource for human activity, food production, biological diversity and all aspects of life on our planet. Drawing on data streams from a national network of research collaborators and water sensor networks, the research team is creating and... more
Health & Life Sciences
Center for Recognition and Inspection of Cells (CRIC)
CRIC - the Center for Recognition and Inspection of Cells - uses massive databases of Pap smear images for the analysis and pre-screening of cervical cells. Our team is dedicated to research and development of software tools and organized cell image catalogues through automated cell... more
Cryptography of the unknown regions of genomes
As sequencing genomes becomes faster and cheaper, more sophisticated informatics tools are needed to answer more intractable questions about the intricacies of genetic regulation. Currently, scientists are able to determine which regions of the genomes are coding regions, or genes, by their easily... more
Deep Learning in Medical Imaging
BIDS and the UCSF Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging are excited to offer a combined educational and research opportunity for motivated undergraduate students in the medical imaging research team. Eligible undergraduate students may register via UC Berkeley's... more
Innovate For Health
The Innovate For Health program was initiated in June 2019 as a collaboration between BIDS at UC Berkeley, the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute (BCHSI) at UCSF, and Janssen Research & Development, LLC (part of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson),... more
Physical Sciences
Enabling future gamma-ray space missions
The next generation of gamma-ray space telescopes aims to open a new window into gamma-ray astronomy with unprecedented angular resolution, energy resolution, and sensitivity. The goals of these new telescopes range from achieving a better understanding of the element formation in our Galaxy, to... more
Learning fundamental properties of physical systems with machine learning
Using data-driven methods and statistical modeling to uncover, unguided by existing theory, the fundamental properties of observed physical systems, this team is using software and data to provide a new pathway to develop a theoretical understanding of the physical world. The data for this project... more
Social Sciences
Demo Watch: Discovering Patterns of Peace and Violence between Police and Protesters
Demo Watch is dedicated to helping civil society better understand how to avoid violence during episodes of political contestation. At present, a surplus of coercive technology is trickling down into the armories of civilian police forces in the United States and around the world. At the same time... more
Liberating Archives: Opening up Public Data for Open Research
Liberating Archives, formerly known as CapitolQuery, is a project converting the static, difficult-to-research Congressional Record into a well-organized, easy-to-query database linking floor speeches and committee hearing minutes to data describing Members of Congress and their constituencies.... more
Online Hate Index
BIDS co-invests in this project with the D-Lab, UC Berkeley’s home for data science training in the humanities and social sciences, to support the development of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) tools for the scalable detection of online hate speech.
Proactive... more
Public Editor
Public Editor is a news evaluation platform designed to improve the public's media literacy and equip them to evaluate the quality of information circulating on the internet. The platform is unique because it invites participation from the entire public. Public Editor is also perhaps the only... more