Software Output Interpretation

Yue Lin

Data Science Fellow 2024-2025
Political Science

Yue is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis on Political Economy. Using mixed methods, she studies foreign lobbying, geopolitical risk, and economic security to understand when, how, and why multinational corporations become the targets and weapons of state power rivalry.

Alex Stephenson

Senior Data Science Fellow
Political Science

I am a Ph.D. Student in the Travers Department of Political Science. My primary research interests are military organizations, policing, the determinants of political violence, and causal inference. I am also interested in creating tools to make software easier to use for non-technical political scientists.

Amanda Glazer

Instructor
Statistics

Amanda is a PhD candidate in the statistics department at Berkeley. Her research focuses on causal inference with applications in education, political science and sports. Previously she earned her Bachelor’s degree in mathematics and statistics, with a secondary in computer science, from Harvard.

Chirag Manghani

Consultant
School of Information

Chirag is a 2nd year graduate at the I-School. Proficient in Python, Java, R, and SQL, he navigates software application development, machine learning and data science. His keen interest lies in data analysis and statistical methods, driving him to bridge theory and practice seamlessly. Chirag's dedication to excellence, adaptable mindset, and innate curiosity define him as a dynamic problem solver in the ever-evolving tech landscape.

Deibi Sibrian

Data Science for Social Justice Fellow 2024
Deibi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, centering critical interdisciplinary ecology and multispecies justice. Deibi coined the term "Cryptonocene," an interdisciplinary framework, to study the socio-environmental health impacts of cryptocurrencies and related technologies, such as AI. With over two years of experience as a graduate instructor, Deibi now is a Graduate Student Researcher, NSF Digital Transformation Fellow, and Mentored Research Fellow. Before joining Berkeley, Deibi was the project manager for an interdisciplinary team...

Propensity Score Matching for Causal Inference: Creating Data Visualizations to Assess Covariate Balance in R

June 10, 2024
Sharon Green
by Sharon Green. Although some people consider randomized experiments the gold standard, in many cases, it would be highly unethical to assign individuals to harmful exposures to measure their effects. Modern causal inference techniques help scientists to estimate treatment effects using observational data. In particular, propensity score matching helps scientists estimate causal effects using observational data by matching individuals so that the “treatment” and “control” groups are balanced on measured covariates. After implementing propensity score matching, data visualizations make it easier to assess the quality of the matches before estimating effects. This blog post is a tutorial for implementing propensity score matching and creating data visualizations to assess covariate balance–that is, visually assessing whether the matched individuals are balanced with respect to measured covariates.

Tactics for Text Mining non-Roman Scripts

April 15, 2024
Hilary Faxon, Ph.D.
by Hilary Faxon, Ph.D. & Win Moe. Non-Roman scripts pose particular challenges for text mining. Here, we reflect on a project that used text mining alongside qualitative coding to understand the politicization of online content following Myanmar’s 2021 military coup.

What Are Vowels Made Of? Graphing a Classic Dataset with R

February 13, 2024
Anna Björklund
by Anna Björklund. Vowels are all around us. Mainstream US English has around twelve unique vowels. How can our brains tell these sounds apart? This blog post will help you answer this question by plotting vowel data from a classic American English dataset by Peterson and Barney (1952).

Reine Ngnonsse

IUSE Undergraduate Advisory Board
Genetics and Plant Biology

Reine Ngnonsse, an enthusiast for math and technology, delved into tutoring math at a community college through the EOPs program. At UC Berkeley, while pursuing Genetics and Plant Biology, She explored R programming in a CRISPR project. As an intern at Health Career Connection, Reine expanded coding skills in Python, R, and Tableau, igniting a passion for programming. With exposure to Python and Javascript, she can't wait to merge mathematical prowess with coding finesse for innovative solutions.

Processing Videos in Python with OpenCV

November 28, 2023
Leah Lee
by Leah Lee. Videos and images are quickly becoming the most common type of data we store and interact with. Computer vision technologies derive useful information from these forms of data and are now commonly used in health care, agriculture, transportation, and security. OpenCV is a powerful tool for image processing and computer vision tasks. In this blog post, we will explore how we can use OpenCV in Python to carry out basic computer vision tasks. Specifically, we’ll focus on the simple task of identifying an object from a video and labeling a frame with a box around the object.