CDSS Discovery incubates and accelerates high impact research in academic, government, non-profit, and industry projects across the globe while providing UC Berkeley students real world research experiences and mentorship opportunities. It is a partnership between BIDS, DSUS, and D-Lab.
In 2015, the program was launched at Berkeley Institute for Data...
Kyla Bourneis developing a national database to scrutinize prosecutors' decisions in cases of police misconduct, particularly in fatal use-of-force incidents and in-custody deaths. This database is a crucial tool for stakeholders analyzing legal accountability and the frequency of criminal charges against officers in such cases. Bourne is scraping and coding thousands of prosecutorial memos, utilizing both qualitative coding and advanced machine learning...
Kyla Bourne's research in the Midwest focuses on how first-time gun offenses are criminally sanctioned. This reform is particularly significant in urban areas like Chicago, where over 90% of cases charged involve black men. Her research is pivotal in understanding how legislative changes can impact probation use, technical violations, and how concurrent charges are handled. This research offers an evaluation of gun law enforcement and it's social implications.
In June 2022, BIDS’ Tim Thomas (Research Training Lead for Berkeley Computational Social Science Program) and his team at Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project (UDP) released a first-of-its-kind machine learning model that predicts the risk of low-income renter displacement at the neighborhood level. With over a year of development, the...
The Evictions Study is an affiliate of the Urban Displacement Project that combines theory and data science to understand demographic disparities and neighborhood drivers of eviction. This interdisciplinary team – a collaboration between researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington – examines court records and Sheriff warrants to identify race, ethnic, and sex disparities of evicted renters, with the goal to...
BIDS Senior Fellow Joshua Blumenstockis offering these four data science projects through UC Berkeley's Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP).
The Data-Intensive Development Lab at UC Berkeley is providing data science support to the governments of several Low and Middle Income Countries, as well as humanitarian organizations like GiveDirectly, who are doing their best to effectively respond to the evolving humanitarian crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. So far, we have provided technical support to governments in Afghanistan,...
Tolani Britton uses quasi-experimental methods to explore the impact of policies on students’ transition from secondary school to higher education, as well as access and retention in higher education. Recent work explores whether the disproportionate increase in incarceration of Black males for drug possessions and manufacture increased gaps in college enrollment rates by race and gender over two time periods- after the passage of the Anti-Drug Act from 1986 - 1993 and after the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act from 1995 - 2000.
What are the main types of concerns that citizens bring to mayors and city councilors in Latin America? What sorts of incentives do public officials have to...
