Google Earth Engine

Valentina Flores

Data Science for Social Justice Fellow 2024
Berkeley Law's Jurisprudence and Social Policy Ph.D. Program

Valentina Flores is a first-year graduate student at Berkeley Law's Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) Ph.D. Program. They hold a joint Political Science and Human Rights Bachelor of Arts (BA) Degree from Bard College. Before JSP, Valentina worked at various criminal justice nonprofits, most notably as an editorial Fellow for PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing program.

Valentina has written about how practices of punishment and surveillance erode the civil rights of the formerly incarcerated and is broadly interested in spatial racism,...

Tracking Urban Expansion Through Satellite Imagery

December 12, 2023
Leïla Njee Bugha
by Leïla Njee Bugha. Among its many uses, remote sensing can prove especially useful to document changes and trends from eras or settings, where traditional sources are either inexistent or infrequently collected. This is the case when one wants to study urban expansion in sub-Saharan countries over the past 20 years. To further remedy the lack of data on land cover uses from earlier time periods, classification methods can be used as well. Using easily accessible satellite imagery from Google Earth Engine, I provide here an example combining remote sensing with classification to detect changes in the land cover in Nigeria since 2000 due to urban expansion.

Suraj Nair

Data Science Fellow
School of Information

I am a PhD Student at the School of Information. My research interests lie at the intersection of development economics and machine learning, with a focus on the use of large scale digital data and new computational tools to study pressing issues in global development.

Melike Sümertaş

Data Science Fellow
History

I hold a PhD in History from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and B.A and M.A degrees from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Department of Architecture, and Program in Architectural History. My research focuses on the urban/architectural/visual culture of the late Ottoman Empire and its capital city Istanbul, with a particular interest in the Greek-Orthodox community. My current project in the History Department of UC Berkeley under the umbrella of the Istanpolis collaboration led by Prof. Christine Philliou, focuses on utilizing digital humanities tools for urban/...

Leïla Njee Bugha

Data Science Fellow
Agricultural and Resource Economics

Leïla Njee Bugha is a 5th year PhD candidate in the Agriculture and Resources Economics department. She studied at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris-Saclay and at Sciences Po Paris in France, before starting a career in the field of program evaluation of public policies. Most recently, she worked as a Research Analyst at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, DC, evaluating childhood nutrition and social protection programs in West Africa. As a PhD student, she specializes in development and labor economics, with a focus on understanding the barriers to...