Software Tools

Introduction to Bash + Git

October 7, 2021, 10:00am
This workshop will start by introducing you to navigating your computer’s file system and basic Bash commands to remove the fear of working with the command line and to give you the confidence to use it to increase your productivity. And then working with Git, a powerful tool for keeping track of changes you make to the files in a project.

Introduction to Bash + Git

October 8, 2021, 9:00am
This workshop will start by introducing you to navigating your computer’s file system and basic Bash commands to remove the fear of working with the command line and to give you the confidence to use it to increase your productivity. And then working with Git, a powerful tool for keeping track of changes you make to the files in a project.

Python Visualization

September 30, 2021, 10:00am
For this workshop, we'll provide an introduction to visualization with Python. We'll cover visualization theory and plotting with Matplotlib and Seaborn, working through examples in a Jupyter notebook.

Python Visualization

October 22, 2021, 10:00am
For this workshop, we'll provide an introduction to visualization with Python. We'll cover visualization theory and plotting with Matplotlib and Seaborn, working through examples in a Jupyter notebook.

R Advanced Data Wrangling: Parts 1-2

October 5, 2021, 2:00pm
Advanced Data Wrangling aims to help students to learn powerful data wrangling tools and techniques in R to wrangle data with less pain and more fun. This workshop will show how R can make your data wrangling process faster, more reliable, and interpretable.

Forecasting Social Outcomes with Deep Neural Networks

October 7, 2025
Paige Park
by Paige Park. Our capacity to accurately predict social outcomes is increasing. Deep neural networks and artificial intelligence are crucial technologies pushing this progress along. As these tools reshape how social prediction is done, social scientists should feel comfortable engaging with them and meaningfully contributing to the conversation. But many social scientists are still unfamiliar with and sometimes even skeptical of deep learning. This tutorial is designed to help close that knowledge gap. We’ll walk step-by-step through training a simple neural network for a social prediction task: forecasting population-level mortality rates.

Decision-Making Under Pressure during My PhD: Lessons from whale songs and ocean noise

May 6, 2025
Jaewon Saw
by Jaewon Saw. This blog post shares a story from a field experiment using Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) to detect whale vocalizations in Monterey Bay. Most of the data got overwhelmed by noise from boat engines, wave motion, and cable instability. On the final day, a spur-of-the-moment decision to add loops to the fiber optic cable dramatically improved signal quality.

Sahiba Chopra

Data Science Fellow 2024-2025
Haas School of Business

I'm a PhD student in the Management and Organizations (Macro) group at Berkeley Haas. I have a diverse professional background, primarily as a data scientist across numerous industries, including fintech, cleantech, and media. I hold a BA in Economics from the University of Maryland, an MS in Applied Economics from the University of San Francisco, and an MS in Business Administration from UC Berkeley.

My research focuses on the intersection of inequality, technology, and the labor market. I am particularly interested in understanding how to reduce inequality in...

Measuring Vowels Without Relying on Sex-Based Assumptions

April 8, 2025
Amber Galvano
by Amber Galvano. This tutorial builds on my previous post on Python for acoustic analysis, this time focusing on measuring vocal tract resonances without relying on sex-based assumptions. I demonstrate how to process audio files and vowel annotations using an adaptive method that optimizes the acoustic analysis across a recording. Instead of fixing parameters based on generalized vocal tract length correlations, this approach varies them within a defined range for greater accuracy. This not only enhances measurement precision but also avoids requiring (or assuming) speakers’ sex in data collection. Finally, I show how to filter for outliers and create high-quality vowel space visualizations.

Demystifying AI

May 5, 2025, 2:30pm
In this workshop, we provide a basic and relatively non-technical introduction to the foundational concepts underlying contemporary AI tools. First, we’ll cover the the fundamentals of AI, Machine Learning, and Neural Networks/Deep Learning. Then, we’ll examine the capabilities and limitations of contemporary AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, and outline best practices for the use of such tools.