Machine Learning

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Below are the consultant we have available with Machine Learning and other expertise listed.

Using Artificial Intelligence to Help Write Code

February 28, 2023
Daniel Tan
by Daniel Tan. ChatGPT is a natural language processing model that has applications in a wide variety of research settings. It is a chatbot-style tool that was created by OpenAI using a deep learning model that allows it to generate human-like responses to a wide variety of questions and prompts spanning a multitude of topics. Because it has been trained on a large body of text, ChatGPT is a particularly useful tool for programming. This post explores ways to use ChatGPT to help write code in Stata, a statistical software package that is widely used in academic and policy research.

Can Machine Learning Models Predict Reality TV Winners? The Case of Survivor

March 14, 2023
Kelly Quinn
by Kelly Quinn. Reality television shows are notorious for tipping the scales to favor certain players they want to see win, but could producers also be spoiling the results in the process? Drawing on data about Survivor, I attempt to predict the likelihood of a contestant making it far into the game based on editing and production decisions, as well as demographic information. This post describes the model used to classify player outcomes and other potential ways to leverage data about reality TV shows for prediction.

Why We Need Digital Hermeneutics

July 13, 2023
Tom van Nuenen
by Tom van Nuenen. Tom van Nuenen discusses the sixth iteration of his course named Digital Hermeneutics at Berkeley. The class teaches the practices of data science and text analysis in the context of hermeneutics, the study of interpretation. In the course, students analyze texts from Reddit communities, focusing on how these communities make sense of the world. This task combines both close and distant readings of texts, as students employ computational tools to find broader patterns and themes. The article reflects on the rise of AI language models like ChatGPT, and how these machines interpret human interpretations. The popularity and profitability of language models presents an issue for the future of open research, due to the monetization of social media data.

My Summer Exploring Data Science for Social Justice: Learnings, Tensions & Recommendations

September 5, 2023
Genevieve Smith
by Genevieve Smith. This summer I joined the D-Lab hosted Data Science for Social Justice workshop at UC Berkeley diving into Python – including TF-IDF, sentiment analysis, word embeddings, and more – with a lens towards leveraging data science for social justice. My team explored a Reddit channel on abortion and used computational analysis to answer key questions related to abortion access from before versus after Roe vs. Wade was overturned. Computational social science is incredibly powerful, but I continue to grapple with tensions particularly as it relates to employing machine learning and large language in international research, and end with key recommendations for CSS practitioners.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Systems, the Poor, and Consent: A Feminist Anti-Colonial Lens to Digitalized Surveillance

September 18, 2023
Alejandro Nuñez
By Alejandro Nuñez. Today’s digital age has created a sea of endless datafication where our everyday interactions, actions, and conversations are turned into data. The advancements of automated artificial intelligence (AI) systems, and their infrastructure in which they are created and trained on, have catapulted us into an era of consistent monitoring and surveillance.

James Hall

Consultant
Department of Statistics

James Hall is a graduate student in the Statistics MA program at University of California, Berkeley. He is a husband and father to three awesome kids. Originally from Baltimore, MD, James earned his bachelors in Mathematics at the United States Military Academy at West Point, NY in 2011, and served as a U.S. Army officer. He’s served as a leader at multiple levels within large organizations with a professional focus on visualizing and communicating complex analysis to decision makers. James’ experience and coursework give him expertise in navigating different statistical methods,...

Thomas Lai

Consulting Drop-In Hours: Fri 3pm-5pm

Consulting Areas: Python, Matlab, APIs, Data Manipulation and Cleaning, Data Science, Data Visualization, Machine Learning, Python Programming, Software Tools, Git or Github, Spotfire

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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.

Cheng Ren

Senior Data Science Fellow
School of Social Welfare

Cheng Ren is a D-Lab Senior Data Science Fellow and a Ph.D. student at the School of Social Welfare. His research interests are community engagement and assessment, nonprofit development, community database, computational social welfare, and data for social goods.

Aniket Gupta

Discovery Fellow
School of Information

I am a first year masters student at UC Berkeley school of Information majoring in Information Management and Systems with a focus on Data Science and ML. I like to build optimized yet simple and scalable solutions powered by data using emerging AI technologies.