Panel Discussion—Launch of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science

Josh Bloom an astronomy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches high-energy astrophysics, Python bootcamps, and a graduate-level class on Python for data-driven science. He has published more than 250 refereed articles, largely on time-domain transients events and telescope/insight automation. Expressed in his research is output of a collaborative effort between talented astronomers, statisticians, and computer scientists (ranging from students to peers) at the nexus of physics, scalable computation, and machine learning.  His book on gamma-ray bursts was published in 2011, as part of the "Frontiers in Physics" series by Princeton University Press. He has been awarded the Pierce Prize from the American Astronomical Society, and he is a former Sloan Fellow, Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society, and Hertz Foundation Fellow. He holds a PhD from Caltech and degrees from Harvard and Cambridge University. Recently, he has working as co-PI of the Moore-Sloan Data Science Initiative at UC Berkeley and an elected member of the management oversight body of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).

Cathryn Carson holds the Thomas M. Siebel Presidential Chair in the History of Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Before receiving her Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University, she was trained in condensed matter physics. Her research deals with the intellectual, political, and institutional history of contemporary science, including theoretical physics and data science. She has served as Associate Dean of Social Sciences, founding Director of the Social Sciences Data Laboratory (D-Lab), founding Senior Fellow of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, Faculty Lead of the Data Science Education Program, and Chair of the Faculty Advisory Board for Berkeley's Data Science Planning Initiative, which developed the blueprint for Berkeley’s organizational realignment around data science. In 2019-20, she served as Associate Dean for Strategy and Planning for the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society. She was a co-I for the Moore/Sloan Data Science Environments.

I am a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, specializing in large-scale data management infrastructure and applications (these days called "big data"). I work primarily in the database (DB) and operating systems and networking technology (OSNT) areas. I am director of the Algorithms, Machines and People Lab (AMPLab)—an industry- and government-supported collaboration of students, postdocs, and faculty who specialize in data management, cloud computing, statistical machine learning, and other important topics necessary for making sense of vast amounts of varied and unruly data. The AMPLab received a National Science Foundation CISE "Expeditions in Computing" Award, which was announced as part of the White House Big Data Research initiative in March 2012.

Deb Agarwal is a Senior Scientist and the Director of the Scientific Data (SciData) Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Agarwal's research focuses on scientific tools which enable sharing of scientific experiments, advanced networking infrastructure to support sharing of scientific data, data analysis support infrastructure for eco-science, and cybersecurity infrastructure to secure collaborative environments. Dr. Agarwal is a Research Affiliate at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and an Inria International Chair, where she co-leads the DALHIS (Data Analysis on Large-scale Heterogeneous Infrastructures for Science) Inria Associate team. Dr. Agarwal also leads teams developing data server infrastructure to significantly enhance data browsing and analysis capabilities and enable eco-science synthesis at the watershed-scale to understand hydrologic and conservation questions and at the global-scale to understand carbon flux. Some of the projects Dr. Agarwal is working on include: Enviromental Systems Science Digital Infrastructure for a Virtual Ecosystem (ESS-DIVE), Watershed Function SFA, AmeriFlux Management Project, FLUXNET, NGEE Tropics, International Soil Carbon Network. Dr. Agarwal received her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from University of California, Santa Barbara and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University.