Data Science

Human-Centered Design for Migrant Rights

October 29, 2024
Victoria Hollingshead
by Victoria Hollingshead. In honor of the 2024 International Day of Care and Support, Victoria Hollingshead shares her recent work with the Center for Migrant Advocacy’s Direct Assistance Program and their innovative approach to supporting Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) using generative AI. OFWs, especially female domestic workers in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), are vulnerable to exploitation from foreign employers and recruitment agencies while having limited access to legal support. Using a design thinking framework, Victoria and CMA’s Direct Assistance team co-designed a proof of concept to enhance the legal and contract literacy among OFWs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a top destination country. This project shows promise in leveraging emerging technologies to empower OFWs, enhancing the Philippines' reputation as a migrant champion and supporting the nation's broader push for digital transformation.

R Copilot Assisted Coding Workshop

November 19, 2024, 10:00am
This workshop provides a beginner-friendly introduction to coding with GitHub Copilot, a popular AI coding assistant. We will start from the basics so you can take advantage of AI assistants to improve your coding and avoid common pitfalls. First, we’ll cover how to install and set-up Visual Studio Code, a free code editor through which we will use GitHub Copilot. Then, we will go through the different features of GitHub Copilot and how to use them to help us code in R.

Concepts and Measurements in Social Network Analysis

October 22, 2024
Christian Caballero
by Christian Caballero. We live in an interconnected world, more so now than ever. Social Network Analysis (SNA) provides a toolkit to study the influence of this interconnectivity. This blog post introduces some key theoretical concepts behind SNA, as well as a family of metrics for measuring influence in a network, known as centrality. These concepts and measurements help form the basis for a theoretically informed study of social relationships in an era where the availability of relational data has dramatically increased thanks to technological advances.

Python Machine Learning Fundamentals: Parts 1-2

November 19, 2024, 1:00pm
This workshop introduces students to scikit-learn, the popular machine learning library in Python, as well as the auto-ML library built on top of scikit-learn, TPOT. The focus will be on scikit-learn syntax and available tools to apply machine learning algorithms to datasets. No theory instruction will be provided.

Python Fundamentals: Parts 4-6

November 4, 2024, 8:00am
This three-part interactive workshop series teaches you intermediate programming Python for people with previous programming experience equivalent to our Python Fundamentals workshop. By the end of the series, you will be able to apply your knowledge of basic principles of programming and data manipulation to a real-world social science application.

The Case for Including Disability in Social Science Demographics

October 15, 2024
Jane (Mango) Angar
by Mango Jane Angar. As we celebrate Disability Awareness Month at the D-Lab alongside the UC Berkeley scholarly community, how can we, as social scientists, individually promote accessibility and inclusion? To advance accessibility, we should focus on addressing the barriers faced by individuals with disabilities, using our research to provide insights for effective policy recommendations. Although most of us do not focus on disability-related issues, including disability as a demographic characteristic in our data collection can greatly enhance our understanding of diverse populations and improve the comprehensiveness of our analyses. This small step can contribute to broader efforts toward inclusion and social equity.

Qualtrics Fundamentals

October 25, 2024, 10:00am
Qualtrics is a powerful online tool available to Berkeley community members that can be used for a range of data collection activities. Primarily, Qualtrics is designed to make web surveys easy to write, test, and implement, but the software can be used for data entry, training, quality control, evaluation, market research, pre/post-event feedback, and other uses with some creativity.

Institutional Review Board (IRB) Fundamentals

October 17, 2024, 3:00pm
Are you starting a research project at UC Berkeley that involves human subjects? If so, one of the first steps you will need to take is getting IRB approval.

Python Web Scraping

October 24, 2024, 2:00pm
In this workshop, we cover how to scrape data from the web using Python. Web scraping involves downloading a webpage's source code and sifting through the material to extract desired data.

Python Web APIs

October 22, 2024, 2:00pm
In this workshop, we cover how to extract data from the web with APIs using Python. APIs are often official services offered by companies and other entities, which allow you to directly query their servers in order to retrieve their data. Platforms like The New York Times, Twitter and Reddit offer APIs to retrieve data.