Blog post

Rural vs. Urban: Using Python to Explore Legislative Data

November 8, 2021
Kellie Hogue

Before COVID-19, becoming a data scientist was never on my radar. As a policy analyst for the California Research Bureau, a legislative research and reference section of the California State Library, I’ve worked on a variety of projects and requests. For the last 8 years, my work has focused on producing timely, confidential ...

Spooky Microbiomes and the Curse of Dimensionality

October 25, 2021
Sean Perez

Microbiomes are all the rage today and this trendiness is clear with the Human Microbiome Market predicted to be valued at more than 1 billion dollars by the year 2027 (up from 376 million in 2019).

With studies showing that our microbial community is associated with health outcomes, from regulating our brain chemistry and behaviors...

Working with Color Data: An Introduction to Colorspaces

October 19, 2021
Josh Everts

For many of us, the colors a computer screen makes are of secondary importance: we would much rather have the screen adjust for the conditions — a bit less blue in the evening, a bit more brightness when it’s sunny — and have a crisp resolution. If the color is about right…it's good enough. For many professionals though, from photographers, to film producers, to Data Scientists, color can become an exacting and important field of study.

For a little backstory on color in general it is important to define why it’s so complex and how creating a...

Working with Patient Data

October 12, 2021
Eileen Cahill

I’ve always been interested in biological information and human health while in more recent years I’ve developed a narrower interest in privacy concerns regarding patient data. When it comes to working with patient health data, I’ve realized a human-centered approach is vital. The question is, which human perspective do we empathize with? There are multiple stakeholders that handle patient data, including the patient, medical professionals, the data managers and systems professionals, the government, and private entities. Each stakeholder has their own set of interests,...

Text Analysis for Public Health

October 5, 2021
Marina Blum
October 5th, 2021 - another day in the global pandemic. Average Joes are busy tweeting about it, politicians give interviews on the latest plans, and newspapers publish article after article on vaccination levels, case counts, and the booster shot. That’s a ton of information. So much in fact, that it would be pretty nice to have some computer assisted help to sort through it. Enter stage right: text analysis. Just what is it, and in the midst of COVID-19, how can it be used to advance public health? Text analysis is a family of analytic techniques used to identify patterns and meaning from unstructured text, that is, text that a computer can’t readily understand. Aka, most qualitative data. And there is a lot of that sort of data floating around. We’re talking tweets, Reddit posts, and emails, but also electronic health records (EHRs), books, and even academic research. You’ll probably agree that in that list alone, there’s a lot of valuable data!

Understanding how organizational structures interact with psychology to influence academic-related behavior

September 8, 2021
Michael Ruiz
The ways in which educational organizations develop programs, approach pedagogy, and emphasize community building result in similarities and differences across different organizations’ structures. However, past research hasn’t developed a conceptual framework for understanding how differences in organizational structures might influence the educational outcomes of students from different backgrounds. The D-Lab NSF IUSE (Improving Undergraduate STEM Education) team sought to develop such a framework by leveraging past research from the fields of education, history, psychology, and sociology.

Assessing the Effectiveness of a Social Norms-Based Sexual Violence Prevention Digital Campaign on the UC Berkeley Campus

August 31, 2021
Swetha Pola
In collaboration with the prevention team at the PATH To Care Center (PTC) at the University of California, Berkeley, we experimentally assess the effectiveness of a sexual violence & sexual harassment (SVSH) prevention social media campaign on perceived social norms. Content Warning: This blog post mentions sexual violence & sexual harassment (SVSH)

Project HOME: Modeling and Mapping Eviction Rates in California

August 18, 2021
Swetha Pola

6 months ago, the D-Lab community made possible a connection between the UC Berkeley School of Information, D-Lab Data Science Fellows, and the Urban Displacement Project (UDP). A summer of brainstorming, collaboration, and multiple Zoom sessions later, the team at Project HOME is excited to present our 5th Year Master of Information and Data...

What to do about Fairness in Machine Learning?

April 7, 2020
Avery Richards

How many thousands of machine learning applications have been developed and gone to market in recent years? Feeding vast amounts of data into software to make decisions for us is a social paradigm the 21st century is embracing to the fullest.

I’m a graduate student of public health, but have a long history as a social worker, student of psychology, literature and the human condition. Since early childhood, one thing I have always been is a science fiction fanatic: human, and societal relationships with technology have fascinated me to the core since before I can remember.

...

Why Teaching Social Scientists How To Code Like A Professional Is Important

September 23, 2020
Jae Yeon Kim, Ph.D.

I use data science to study political learning, organization, and mobilization among marginalized populations. I have always loved programming and want to serve people lacking voice and representation in a society. I am blessed to have found and chosen computational social science—a field situated between social science and data science—as my main research area.

I also love teaching people how to code, especially social scientists, and I take that mission seriously. I have taught computational tools and techniques at both graduate and undergraduate levels in semester-...