Research Design

Institutional Review Board (IRB) Fundamentals

February 18, 2025, 9:00am
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.

Language Models in Mental Health Conversations – How Empathetic Are They Really?

December 3, 2024
by Sohail Khan. Language models are becoming integral to daily life as trusted sources of advice. While their utility has expanded from simple tasks like text summarization to more complex interactions, the empathetic quality of their responses is crucial. This article explores methods to assess the emotional appropriateness of these models, using metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE, and Sentence Transformers. By analyzing models like LLaMA in mental health dialogues, we learn that while they suffer through traditional word-based metrics, LLaMA's performance in capturing empathy through semantic similarity is promising. In addition, we must advocate for continuous monitoring to ensure these models support their users' mental well-being effectively.

A Recipe for Reliable Discoveries: Ensuring Stability Throughout Your Data Work

November 19, 2024
by Jaewon Saw. Imagine perfecting a favorite recipe, then sharing it with others, only to find their results differ because of small changes in tools or ingredients. How do you ensure the dish still reflects your original vision? This challenge captures the principle of stability in data science: achieving acceptable consistency in outcomes relative to reasonable perturbations of conditions and methods. In this blog post, I reflect on my research journey and share why grounding data work in stability is essential for reproducibility, adaptability, and trust in the final results.

LLMs for Exploratory Research

December 10, 2024, 1:00pm
In a fast evolving artificial intelligence landscape, LLMs such as GPT have become a common buzzword. In the research community, their advantages and pitfalls are hotly debated. In this workshop, we will explore different chatbots powered by LLMs, beyond just ChatGPT. Our main goal will be to understand how LLMs can be used by researchers to conduct early-stage (or exploratory) research. Throughout the workshop, we will discuss best practices for prompt engineering and heuristics to evaluate the suitability of an LLM's output for our research purposes. Though the workshop primarily focuses on early-stage research, we will briefly discuss the use cases of LLMs in later stages of research, such as data analysis and writing.

The Case for Including Disability in Social Science Demographics

October 15, 2024
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.

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.

Anusha Bishop

Availability: By appointment only

Consulting Areas: Python, R, Cloud & HPC Computing, Data Sources, Data Visualization, Geospatial Data, Maps & Analysis, Machine Learning, Research Design, Cluster analysis, Experimental design, Hierarchical Models, High dimensional statistics, Means Tests, Nonparametric methods, Regression Analysis, Software Output Interpretation, Spatial statistics, Bash or Command Line, Excel, Git or Github, RStudio

Institutional Review Board (IRB) Fundamentals

November 7, 2022, 12:00pm
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.

Institutional Review Boards (IRB) Fundamentals

March 17, 2022, 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.

Institutional Review Board (IRB) Fundamentals

October 9, 2023, 9:00am
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.