Light the Way: The Campaign for Berkeley

To keep pace with demand, Berkeley’s burgeoning data science education program has by necessity leveraged the talent of undergraduate students, in partnership with faculty and staff, to assist with courses and assume leadership roles.

In her freshman year, Vinitra Swamy B.S. and M.S. ’18 took the foundational course in data science (Data 8) and joined three student teams, including one charged with helping develop curriculum for the then-nonexistent data science major. As a sophomore, she became Data 8’s head teaching assistant. Swamy completed in three years both a bachelor’s in computer science and a master’s in electrical engineering and computer sciences, with a thesis on Data 8’s software infrastructure. After graduating, Swamy taught Data 8 as a summer session lecturer before starting her career at Microsoft Research.

Data 8’s blend of computation and statistics concepts through concrete examples with actual data has proved very popular; enrollment shot up from fewer than 100 students in 2015 to 1,500 this past spring.

“Data 8 was a really unique environment, where a lot of the problems they asked us to solve seemed really relevant and applied to the real world,” says Violet Sinnarkar ’20. “I had never really had that experience in a class before.” Sinnarkar shifted her major from economics to data science.

“I wish I had had that course,” says Susan Lyne, who attended Berkeley before the advent of Data 8 and before becoming a successful magazine and television executive. More recently, Lyne founded BBG Ventures to make venture capital funding more accessible to women founding tech startups.

“When I heard about the data science initiative, it sounded like a smart thing for the university to be doing and a tremendous opportunity for the students,” says Lyne. “A working knowledge of data science is going to prepare students for the world they are entering and put them in a position to succeed.” Lyne was moved to provide a gift so that even more students from diverse backgrounds could enroll in Data 8 or in associated “connector courses” that apply data science concepts to an array of subjects, such as geography, history, and legal studies.

This gift joins two other significant contributions approaching $2 million in support of Berkeley’s new College of Computing, Data Sciences, and Society. Isabel ’91 and In Sik ’93 Rhee donated funds to hire a full-time major advisor and liaison to guide students along their preferred educational pathway. A portion of the Rhees’ generous gift will grow internship opportunities and foster greater undergraduate participation and collaboration with graduate students and faculty as part of the Data Science Discovery Program.

The Discovery Program matches students emerging from Data 8 to research projects on campus or in the private and public sectors. Recent research topics have ranged from brain imaging to urban planning to seeking extraterrestrial life. This spring, students participated in nearly 40 projects, but there is plenty of potential to extend the depth and duration of student involvement and expand the public impact.

That was the impetus for Data Collaboratives, an initiative launched last fall with a grant from Schmidt Futures that will channel student energy and innovation toward helping private companies, government agencies, and nonprofits tackle complex problems using untapped datasets. “A successful data collaborative requires going from data to knowledge to action,” says Tom Kalil, chief innovation officer at Schmidt Futures and previously Berkeley’s special assistant to the chancellor for science and technology. “I’ve always been impressed by Cal students’ creativity, entrepreneurial mindset, and commitment to the public interest.”

Violet Sinnarkar oversees the student teams partnering with the California State Water Resources Control Board on a water data collaborative to address the lack of access to clean, safe drinking water for one million California residents. One team is developing a mapping tool to help individual cities or counties see distinct water sources for different areas. The students have also advised the state agency on an optimal machine-readable format for gathering water data to facilitate analysis.

With the Schmidt Futures funding, the college will host an orientation on data collaborative methodology for all Discovery Program participants, some of whom will become project leaders or mentors starting this fall. “To me, it’s important that the water data collaborative is an ecosystem of research and mentorship and leadership, by students and for students,” says Sinnarkar. “I feel like that’s a uniquely Berkeley thing."