Software Tools

Digitization of Historical Maps in the Age of AI

December 3, 2025
Elena Stacy
by Elena Stacy. Researchers today increasingly have access to a wealth of tools to streamline or automate labor-intensive data processing and generation tasks. When it comes to mapping, progress has been slower. This blog details the author's experience tackling the digitization of a historical map in the age of AI.

Aaron Culich

Former Deputy Director of D-Lab; Cyberinfrastructure Architect and Consulting Lead

Aaron Culich is a staff member at the D-Lab with expertise in Cloud Computing, High Performance Computing (HPC), Databases (SQL and NoSQL), JupyterHub and BinderHub infrastructure, and a variety of programming languages (Python, R, Java, C, C++, and more). His ongoing mission is to explore new compute possibilities, discovering useful tools and practices, and making them more accessible to researchers on campus and beyond.

A Practical Guide to Shift-Share Instruments (and What I Learned Replicating the China Shock)

November 26, 2025
Jiayu Lai
by Jiayu Lai. Shift-share instruments are among the most widely used tools in applied economics, appearing in labor, trade, immigration, and policy evaluation research. But despite their popularity, many researchers still use them as black boxes — and risk invalid instruments as a result. In this blog post, I unpack how shift-share IVs actually work, why their validity depends on both the “shifts” and the “shares,” and what practical steps researchers should take to check assumptions. I also walk through how I used the Borusyak–Hull–Jaravel (2022, 2025) framework to reproduce the seminal Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013) China shock analysis.

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...

Beyond the Hype: How We Built AI Tools That Actually Support Learning

November 12, 2025
Weiying Li
by Weiying Li. What does genuine partnership look like when building AI for education? Working with middle school teachers and computer scientists, we co-designed AI dialogs where teachers are valuable contributors to refine what the AI understands as valuable thinking. Through iterative refinement, teachers identified precursor ideas and observations that predicted future learning, and refined guidance design in the dialog. Our AI dialog sees learning the way teachers do, built through genuine collaboration where both model development, learning sciences theories, and teachers' classroom expertise work together from the start, not just at the end.

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.

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.

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.