Software Tools

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.

Michael Ruiz

IUSE Research Team
Psychology

Michael earned his B.A.in Psychology from UC Berkeley and currently works as the manager of Professor Okonofua's Equity, Diversity, and Empathy Navigation Sciences Lab in the UC Berkeley Psychology department.

Hikari Murayama

Senior Data Science Fellow, Senior Instructor
Digital Health Social Justice
Energy and Resources Group

Hikari is a graduate student in the Energy and Resource Group. Her research interests involve utilizing remote sensing and geospatial analysis to address pressing problems at the intersection of humans and climate. She recently served as a Data Science for Social Good Fellow at the University of Washington eScience Institute in the summer of 2020. She is experienced and happy to help in the areas of geospatial analysis, remote sensing, and other statistical analyses and methods. Hikari is devoted to helping community members realize their potential to conduct...

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.

Christopher Paciorek, Ph.D.

Research Computing Consultant, Adjunct Professor
Department of Statistics
Research IT

Chris Paciorek is an adjunct professor in the Department of Statistics, as well as the Statistical Computing Consultant in the Department's Statistical Computing Facility (SCF) and in the Econometrics Laboratory (EML) of the Economics Department. He is also a user support consultant for Berkeley Research Computing. He teaches and presents workshops on statistical computing topics, with a focus on R.

Frank Hidalgo Ruiz

Data Science Fellow
Chemistry

I am currently a 5th-year Chemical Biology Ph.D. student. My research focuses on understanding the mechanism by which mutations in a protein called Ras lead to tumorigenesis. More specifically, I aim to integrate high-throughput mutagenesis, coevolutionary analysis, and machine learning algorithms to generate a predictive model. Over the last year, I have built a Python package to process, analyze, and visualize Next Generation Sequencing datasets. I love collaborating across research fields and sharing my passion for data science.

Spencer Le

Data Peer Consultant, UTech
Computer Science
Data Science

I am a senior majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Data Science. I love crunching down big data and analyzing it in order to help solve real-life issues. In my free time, I like jamming out to music, drawing, studying history, and posting on my foodstagram. If you have any questions regarding Computer Science or Data Science, please stop by!

Eileen Cahill

D-Lab Alumni
School of Information

Eileen is currently a first year Information Management and Systems student committed to studying human-centered design for the utility and usability of healthcare systems. She spent the last few years working in genomic research program analysis and management at the National Human Genome Research Institute. Prior to that, Eileen attended Georgetown University where she studied biology and studio art. During this time, she performed research on water contaminants in an analytical chemistry lab as well as research on estrogen mimicking compound effects on Zebrafish in a brain...

Adam Anderson, Ph.D.

Research Training Manager; Postdoc Lecturer
Digital Humanities

I’m an interdisciplinary data scientist, with a background in Middle Eastern languages (Hebrew, Arabic, and historical languages like Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian). I’ve worked in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Turkey with archaeological sites and museums. My technical skills include: translation and data storytelling, data forensics (3D imaging, mapping, modeling), computational linguistics (CTA, NLP, OCR), and network analysis (SNA). My roles on campus include: Research Training Manager of the Computational Social Science Training Program; Postdoc Lecturer...