The Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) is a central hub of research and education within

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

designed to facilitate data-intensive science and earn grants to be disseminated within the sciences. BIDS was initially funded by grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the

Sloan Foundation The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is an American philanthropic nonprofit organization. It was established in 1934 by Alfred P. Sloan Jr., then-president and chief executive officer of General Motors. The Sloan Foundation makes grants to support ...

as part of a three-year grant with data science institutes at

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, ...

and the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seat ...

. The objective of the three-university initiative is to bring together domain experts from the natural and social sciences, along with methodological experts from computer science, statistics, and applied mathematics. The organization has an executive director and a faculty director,

Saul Perlmutter Saul Perlmutter (born September 22, 1959) is a U.S. astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts & Science ...

, who won the

2011 Nobel Prize in Physics The Nobel Prize in Physics ( sv, Nobelpriset i fysik) is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in the various fields of physics. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the 1895 will of Alfred No ...

. The initiative was announced at a White House

Office of Science and Technology Policy An office is a space where an organization's employees perform administrative work in order to support and realize objects and goals of the organization. The word "office" may also denote a position within an organization with specific d ...

event to highlight and promote advances in data-driven scientific discovery, and is a core component of the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

's strategic plan for building national capacity in data science.

Working groups

There are six working groups that are common across the three universities included in the original Moore/Sloan grant. The working groups are intended to "address the major challenges facing advances in data-intensive research" and include ''Career Paths and Alternative Metrics'', ''Reproducibility and Open Science'', ''Education and Training'', ''Ethnography and Evaluation, Software Tools and Environments, and Working Spaces and Culture.'' and while all three are separate aspects of one division, they were awarded different grant money.

Notable fellows

A primary objective of BIDS is to build a community of data science fellows and senior fellows across academic disciplines. The 23 current fellows constitute the majority of the onsite liveware at the Institute, which supports a number of notable initiatives (via Fellow support). The following list is a subset of notable fellows to date: * Nick Adams, fellow, principal investigator of the Deciding Force project * Fernando Pérez, senior fellow, creator of Jupyter and

IPython IPython (Interactive Python) is a command shell for interactive computing in multiple programming languages, originally developed for the Python programming language, that offers introspection, rich media, shell syntax, tab completion, and his ...

* Dan Hammer, fellow,

Presidential Innovation Fellow The Presidential Innovation Fellows program is a competitive fellowship program that pairs top innovators from the private sector, non-profits, and academia with top innovators in government to collaborate on solutions that aim to deliver signifi ...

and former Chief Data Scientist at the

World Resources Institute The World Resources Institute (WRI) is a global research non-profit organization established in 1982 with funding from the MacArthur Foundation under the leadership of James Gustave Speth. WRI's activities are focused on seven areas: food, fo ...

* Kathryn Huff, fellow, author of Effective Computation in Physics * Leonard Apeltsin, Health Innovation Fellow, Head of Data Science at Anomaly, co-founder of Primer.ai and author of Data Science Bookcamp: Five Python Projects * Stéfan Van Der Walt, computational fellow, author of scikit-image *

Laura Waller Laura Ann Waller is a computer scientist and Ted Van Duzer Endowed Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She was awarded a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Fellowship to develop microscopes to image deep structures within the ...

References

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External links

Official website
University of California, Berkeley 2013 establishments in California