News

New database on police use of force and misconduct in California makes records public

August 4, 2025
BIDS Staff

Today, the Police Records Access Project, part of the CLEAN initiative at BIDS, became a publicly available database following years of work by a multidisciplinary team of journalists, data scientists, lawyers and civil liberties advocates, led by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), UC Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) and...

This Month at BIDS - April 2025

April 21, 2025
Lilli Wessling Hart

Read our April 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 • ...

Building Bridges: Highlights from the Inaugural UC Open Source Meetup

July 15, 2025
Jamilah Karah

The first-ever UC Open Source Contributors & Maintainers Virtual Meetup welcomed faculty, staff, and researchers from across the University of California system into a shared space for connection, discovery, and collaboration. Organized by the UC Open Source Program Office (UC OSPO), this meetup marked the beginning of a new effort to build bridges across campuses and celebrate the growing ecosystem of open source work throughout the UC system. UC Berkeley was well represented, with participants bringing a range of experiences and...

Building the Open Network: Friday Morning Panel Showcases Leadership Across the Open Source Ecosystem

July 3, 2025
Tyler Hawthorne

On the final morning of the National Workshop on Data Science Education, BIDS Executive Director, Kirstie Whitaker, presented a panel that exemplified what makes UC Berkeley’s data science community a driving force behind the future of open, collaborative infrastructure. Each speaker, deeply involved in projects like Jupyter, GeoJupyter,...

This Month at BIDS - May 2025

May 22, 2025
Lilli Wessling Hart

Read our May 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 • ...

Clancy Wilmott presents "Data practice as theoretical inquiry: machine learning, polygons and other notebook adventures in cartography and GIS"

May 22, 2025
BIDS Staff

On March 17, Clancy Wilmott, Assistant Professor in the department of Geography at UC Berkeley, presented her work "Data practice as theoretical inquiry: machine learning, polygons and other notebook adventures in cartography and GIS". Wilmott begins with describing a disciplinary war that is taking place in areas of research, like Geography. There is a technology of control but there are also important ways spatial data can be used to help people improve their lives. She navigates the two sides of the...

This Month at BIDS - March 2025

March 14, 2025
Lilli Wessling Hart

Read our March 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 •...

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...