News

Melanie Walsh presents “AI Fiction in the Wild”

February 10, 2026

The Cultural Analytics Series, jointly organized by the UC Berkeley School of Information and Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), highlights research that uses data-driven methods to study cultural phenomena.

In the fall of 2025, the series featured the presentation "AI...

A celebration of Stacey Dorton: Enduring Impact at UC Berkeley

January 29, 2026

We at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science celebrate Stacey Dorton upon her retirement from BIDS and UC Berkeley. After graduating from UC Berkeley in women’s studies, she returned to campus in 2015 as our first Administrative Manager while the Institute was just getting started. It is not an exaggeration to say that BIDS would not have developed into a leading data science institute without her! Upon learning of Dorton’s retirement, her colleagues and friends - both current and former UC Berkeley...

Welcoming our newest cohort of BIDS interns

January 29, 2026

We are delighted to welcome six Berkeley students as interns for BIDS.

Our recently expanded team will welcome researchers and visitors to events on campus and at our AI Futures Lab, a partnership with UC Investments. Our collective goal is to bring people together, to facilitate conversations both during scheduled events and in the “corridors” between those presentations. BIDS interns will be integral to...

Peter Fackeldey introduces “Awkward Array: manipulating nested, variable-sized data with NumPy-like idioms”

January 29, 2026

Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University, Peter Fackeldey, introduced the solution that finally brings effective and fast calculations to the irregular world of high-energy physics: Awkward Array. Presenting his work "Awkward Array: manipulating nested, variable-sized data with NumPy-like idioms" at BIDS on June 6, 2025, Fackeldey brought...

JupyterCon, and the Next 100 Programming Systems

December 16, 2025

JupyterCon 2025 was an amazing tour of all the exciting things happening across the Jupyter Ecosystem. Education,...

Reflections from JupyterCon San Diego 2025: Lessons for Berkeley DataHub

December 16, 2025

JupyterCon returned to San Diego this November, and I’m genuinely grateful I had the chance to be there. The energy of the community—educators, researchers, maintainers, enterprise teams, and so many others—was contagious. Every conversation felt like a reminder of why this ecosystem matters and how lucky we are to be part of it.

For those of us working on Berkeley DataHub, the conference was more than a series of talks. It was an...

Nicole Starosielski presents "Facilitating Sustainability: Cable Landing Stations and the Alternative History of Network Architectures"

August 29, 2025

On March 31, Nicole Starosielski, Professor of Film & Media at UC Berkeley, presented work at BIDS on undersea cables and digital infrastructure “Facilitating Sustainability: Cable Landing Stations and the Alternative History of Network Architectures”.

Starosielski has been doing research on the physical installations that support Internet traffic, including data centers,...

Cultural Analytics inaugural lecture “Universality and Diversity in Story and Song” with Manvir Singh

November 19, 2025

The new Cultural Analytics speaker series — a collaboration between the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) — launched on October 2 with its inaugural speaker, Manvir Singh, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Davis. The series builds on inaugural talks in the past two years by...

Themes of Day 1, JupyterCon 2025: Collaboration and Modularity

November 5, 2025

Rising to the challenge by leveraging collaboration and modularity were strong themes of Day 1 at JupyterCon 2025. Keynote speaker David Donoho spoke of data science as a continuous challenge with researchers both pushing the envelope and collaborating; papers are built on common datasets and ultimately share methods that anyone with the requisite expertise can use (Donoho, 2017). This reflected my formative experiences with data science; as an undergraduate completing an honors thesis, I modified a published...