News

Fast and effective connections: the NetworkX developers’ retreat in February 2025

March 12, 2025
Jarrod Millman

In February 2025, I was part of the NetworkX leadership team that convened in Berkeley for a developers' retreat. We had three goals: to unblock some of our thorny development tasks, reflect on and update our long term vision, and spend time reconnecting in person.

Like many scientific open source projects, our team is distributed and primarily collaborates online. We coordinate work and engage community members around the world via our NetworkX GitHub repositories. We...

Director's Vision 2024

BIDS: a space for Open Scholarship, Open Source, and interdisciplinary collaboration on AI in science and society

April 15, 2024

Dear Berkeley Community,

I started as Faculty Director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) in January 2024; today I would like to share some ideas I have for how BIDS can be a partner to your work. In the coming weeks the Associate Faculty Director, Professor Tim Tangherlini, will...

Project Jupyter Wins Technical Advancement to Enable Open Science Award

April 1, 2024
Lilli Wessling Hart

On March 21, 2024, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced the winners of the OSTP Year of Open Science Recognition Challenge. Project Jupyter, a community of open-source developers, scientists, educators, and data scientists, was recognized with the Technical Advancement to Enable Open Science award...

Nina Beguš presents her work "Artificial Humanities"

February 10, 2025
BIDS Staff

On February 3, Nina Beguš, a researcher and lecturer at UC Berkeley, presented her work "Artificial Humanities" to attendees at the BIDS Suite in Sutardja Dai Hall and online. We in the audience were invited to understand how fictional narratives shape the human creation and understanding of artificial intelligence.

Beguš focused on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion: published in 1911 and...

This Month at BIDS - February 2025

February 21, 2025
Lilli Wessling Hart

Read our February newsletter now! To stay up to date on upcoming news and events at BIDS, check out our events calendar, sign up for our newsletter, and follow us (Bluesky •...

This Month at BIDS - January 2025

January 17, 2025
Lilli Wessling Hart

Read our January newsletter now! To stay up to date on upcoming news and events at BIDS, check out our events calendar, sign up for our newsletter, and follow us (Bluesky •...

Meet Kirstie Whitaker, new executive director at BIDS

February 5, 2025
Tiffany Lohwater

The Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) welcomed Kirstie Whitaker as its executive director last month. BIDS is an interdisciplinary data science community and part of the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society.

No stranger to UC Berkeley, Whitaker received her PhD in neuroscience before completing a postdoc at Cambridge University. She spent the last eight years in London at the Alan Turing Institute, first as a research fellow mentoring doctoral projects on topics including machine learning prediction...

https://cdss.berkeley.edu/news/meet-kirstie-whitaker-new-executive-director-bids

UC Berkeley joins effort to advance open source initiatives across UC system

April 17, 2024

UC Berkeley is joining an ambitious effort to advance open source research, education and public service across the University of California system.

The Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) will lead the university’s involvement in this initiative, launching an office to house the campus’s extensive open source expertise. This program office is one of six in the UC system that will work individually and collectively to benefit society through open source endeavors.

"BIDS will serve as an interdisciplinary community hub where computing, data, science and society...

https://cdss.berkeley.edu/news/uc-berkeley-joins-effort-advance-open-source-init…

This Month at BIDS - November 2024

November 29, 2024
Lilli Wessling Hart

Read our November newsletter now! To stay up to date on upcoming news and events at BIDS, check out our events calendar, sign up for our newsletter, and follow us (Bluesky •...

Stéfan van der Walt and Scientific Python: Community, Tools, and Open Science

November 20, 2024
Lilli Wessling Hart

At the May 2024 BIDS Seminar, Stéfan van der Walt presented the Scientific Python project, exploring the history of the ecosystem, the people driving its progress, and its role at UC Berkeley.

The scientific Python ecosystem comprises foundational libraries like NumPy and SciPy, technique-specific libraries like NetworkX and scikit-image, and domain-...