UC Berkeley School of Information

Satish Ramachandran is the global head of design at Nutanix, where he is dedicated to applying design to reimagine enterprise computing. In this role he ensures the products being built serve the users’ intent, with very minimal, simple, and delightful interactions. Additionally, he focuses on scaling the design organization across geos and implementing processes to keep pace with rapid growth. Prior to Nutanix, Satish held a variety of management and technical leadership roles over the past two decades at computing infrastructure companies such as DataDomain (EMC), Andiamo (Cisco), and Tandem (HP). A deep background in engineering coupled with a longstanding interest in literature, music, cognition, human behavior, and philosophy enables him to bridge the twin worlds of design and engineering effectively. Satish holds an M.S. in computer science. He lives in Silicon Valley with his family.

MIDS graduate Ronald Cordell delivered the student speech at the UC Berkeley School of Information’s January 2017 commencement ceremony. Ron completed his MIDS degree in summer 2016. Ron also holds an MBA from Georgia State University and currently serves as staff software engineer at Sentient Technologies, which focuses on breakthrough artificial intelligence products.

Fast growing startups can launch your career. But breaking into one can sometimes feel like learning a new language. Join Dhawal Mujumdar, MIMS alum 2011 and founder of AdsNative, as he shares insider tips and first-hand experience on making your career in the startup world. Learn how to find interesting startups and evaluate their worth, what roles are most sought after from founders at various stages of the company, how to determine what you bring to the table, and finally - how to connect with startups in a meaningful way, framing your experience to present maximum value and produce positive results. . . . . . . . . Dhawal Mujumdar is a founder of AdsNative, a fast growing startup based out of San Francisco that builds leading monetization software for apps and websites. AdsNative has raised $11 Million in venture financing from leading institutional investors and have offices in San Francisco, New York City, and Bangalore, India. Dhawal has bachelors degree in Computer Science and attended UC Berkeley for his master's degree from School of Information. Dhawal also worked as a visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley.

Tech entrepreneurs and policy wonks share a common desire to understand and shape the world, but often have different views, tools, and models for impact. Hear an inside perspective from two former members of President Obama’s White House team about how tech policy and presidential priorities intersect, and how technology will increasingly drive the decision-making process and implementation in the years to come. . . . . . . . . . . . Nicole Wong Former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Nicole Wong is the former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer focusing on internet, privacy, and innovation policy. Prior to joining the Obama administration, Nicole served as the legal director for products at Twitter. From 2004 to 2011, she was Google’s vice president and deputy general counsel, primarily responsible for the company’s product and regulatory matters. Before joining Google, Nicole was a partner at the law firm of Perkins Coie and advised some of Silicon Valley’s early and notable tech companies, including Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Netscape. She also has taught media and internet law and policy courses as an adjunct professor and lecturer at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and University of San Francisco. Nicole is a frequent speaker and author on issues related to law and technology, including five appearances before the US Congress regarding internet policy. She is a founding columnist for the Christian Science Monitor’s Passcode, a section covering online security and privacy in the digital age. She serves as an advisor to the UC Berkeley School of Information, the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative, and several technology companies on privacy, regulatory strategy and international development. Nicole chairs the board of Friends of Global Voices, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting citizen and online media projects globally, and sits on the board of WITNESS, an organization promoting the use of video to advance human rights. Nicole received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Georgetown University, and a law degree and a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley. . . . . . . . . . . . Greg Nelson Former Chief of Staff, Special Assistant to the President, and Senior Advisor, National Economic Council, The White House Greg Nelson left the White House this summer after six and a half years as a senior leader in the economic policy, technology, and strategic partnerships teams. During his tenure, his policy portfolio included international trade, economic policy, and US participation in the G7 and G20, infrastructure, technology policy, energy, entrepreneurship, and startups. For two years, Greg was the chief of staff at the National Economic Council for director Gene Sperling, where he coordinated economic policy development, managed strategy and communications, and worked across the White House and cabinet to develop and implement the president’s economic policy priorities. Previously, Greg was deputy director of the White House Office of Public Engagement focused on public-private partnerships and setting up the White House’s private sector engagement infrastructure, including as deputy director of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Prior to the White House, Greg built and sold a technology company, developed startups in energy and biomaterials, and consulted for businesses, nonprofits, and foundations. He holds a BA in political science and history from Yale University.

Twenty years after the World Wide Web was created, can we now make it better? How can we ensure that our most important values — privacy, free speech, and open access to knowledge — are enshrined in the code itself? In a provocative call to action, entrepreneur and Open Internet advocate Brewster Kahle challenges us to build a better, decentralized Web based on new distributed technologies. He lays out a path to creating a new Web that is reliable, private, but still fun — in order to lock the Web open for good. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A passionate advocate for public Internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: providing universal access to all knowledge. He is the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, one of the largest libraries in the world. Soon after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied artificial intelligence, Kahle helped found the company Thinking Machines, a supercomputer maker. In 1989, Kahle created the Internet’s first publishing system called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), later selling the company to AOL. In 1996, Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, which helps catalog the Web, selling it to Amazon.com in 1999. The Internet Archive, which he founded in 1996, now preserves 25 petabytes of data — the books, Web pages, music, television, and software of our cultural heritage, working with more than 450 library and university partners to create a digital library, accessible to all. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . About the Internet Archive The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996 with the mission to provide “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” The organization seeks to preserve the world’s cultural heritage and to provide open access to our shared knowledge in the digital era, supporting the work of historians, scholars, journalists, students, the blind and reading disabled, as well as the general public. The Internet Archive’s digital collections include more than 25 petabytes of data: 460 billion Web captures, moving images (2.2 million films and videos), audio (2.5 million recordings, 140,000 live concerts), texts (8 million texts including 3 million digital books), software (100,000 items) and television (3 million hours). Each day, 2-3 million visitors use or contribute to the archive, making it one of the world’s top 250 sites. It has created new models for digital conservation by forging alliances with more than 450 libraries, universities and national archives around the world. The Internet Archive champions the public benefit of online access to our cultural heritage and the import of adopting open standards for its preservation, discovery and presentation.

Will Facebook play a decisive role in the 2016 presidential primaries? Should Twitter be blamed for the rise of the Islamic State? Has the Chinese government successfully marginalized political dissent by controlling the companies that run China’s Internet? The fast-evolving power relationships — and clashes — among governments, corporations, and other non-state actors across digital networks pose fundamental challenges to how we think about governance, accountability, security, and human rights. Without new approaches to governance and accountability by public as well as private actors, the Internet of the future will no longer be compatible with the defense and protection of human rights. Nor will its users — or governments — be any more secure. Fortunately a nascent ecosystem of efforts are now experimenting with new ways to hold governments, companies, and other actors accountable when they exercise power across global networks. One such effort is the Ranking Digital Rights project, which sets forth a framework for measuring information and communication technology (ICT) companies’ commitments, policies, and practices affecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy. In this lecture, Ranking Digital Rights director Rebecca MacKinnon discusses the project’s Corporate Accountability Index as a concrete example how stakeholders around the globe are working to create new frameworks, mechanisms, and processes for holding power accountable and promoting the protection of human rights in a digitally networked world. . . . . . . . Rebecca MacKinnon is a leading advocate for Internet users’ rights to online freedom of expression and privacy around the world. She is author of the award-winning book Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom (Basic Books, 2012). Presently based at New America in Washington, D.C., she directs the Ranking Digital Rights project whose Corporate Accountability Index ranks the world’s most powerful Internet and telecommunications companies on policies and practices affecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy. MacKinnon is co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices, a borderless community of more than 800 writers, digital media experts, activists, and translators living around the world who give voice to the stories of marginalized and misrepresented communities and who advocate for the free expression rights of Internet users everywhere. She also serves on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists and is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder organization focused on upholding principles of freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon was CNN’s Beijing bureau chief from 1998 to 2001 and Tokyo bureau chief from 2001 to 2003. Since leaving CNN in 2004 she has held fellowships at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press and Public Policy, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Open Society Foundations, and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. For two years in 2007–08 she served on the faculty of the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, and taught as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Fall 2013. She is also a visiting affiliate at the Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Global Communications Studies. MacKinnon received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard University and was a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan. She presently lives in Washington, D.C.

Use of new data technologies now pervades our institutions, both private and government. But this data-driven revolution is far from complete. We can still influence where it takes us. I will discuss some of the current challenges we face, both technical and social, and how we might address them. Doug Cutting (@cutting) is the founder of numerous successful open-source projects, including Lucene, Nutch, Avro, and Hadoop. Doug joined Cloudera in 2009 from Yahoo!, where he was a key member of the team that built and deployed a production Hadoop storage and analysis cluster for mission-critical business analytics. Doug holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and sits on the board of the Apache Software Foundation.

Privacy is a critical challenge for mobile application development. Mobile applications are easy to build and distribute, and can collect diverse personal data. US policy approaches to data protection in the mobile ecosystem rely on privacy by design: approaches that encourage developers to proactively implement best-practice privacy features to protect sensitive data. But we don’t know what factors motivate developers to implement privacy features when faced with disincentives such as longer development timelines, markets for personal data, and tensions between data protection and data-enabled services. This project begins to identify these factors by investigating how mobile developers talk about and deal with privacy challenges. Interviews with developers and analysis of posts on developer forums reveal that developers are actively grappling with privacy issues. This talk will describe how developers define and legitimate privacy, and describe how knowledge of how to approach privacy problems is disseminated. Understanding the development of privacy as a professional practice can help us shape better guidelines for privacy by design, and broach challenges to the widespread adoption of privacy by design principles. Katie Shilton is an assistant professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research explores ethics and policy for the design of information collections, systems and technologies. Current research projects include an investigation of ethics in mobile application development; a project focused on the values and policy implications of Named Data Networking, a new approach to Internet architecture; surveys of consumer privacy expectations in the mobile data ecosystem; and investigating researchers’ ethical beliefs and practices when using online open data sets. Her work has been supported by a Google Faculty Award and several awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER award. Katie received a B.A. from Oberlin College, a Master of Library and Information Science from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in information studies from UCLA.

Dale Dougherty is the founder and executive chairman of Maker Media, Inc. which launched Make: magazine in 2005, and Maker Faire, which held its first event in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. Dale’s vision and mission continue to be the guiding force for the family of brands. “The maker movement is contributing to a thriving market ecosystem, serving the needs of makers as they seek out product support, startup advice, and funding avenues. Make: plays an important role as a collaborator and resource for makers as they transition from hobbyists to professionals.” As executive chairman, Dale is involved in editorial and content strategy and both business and product development. As part of this process, he forges strategic partnerships in support of maker education and global, cultural, and economic initiatives. Make: began at O’Reilly Media, where Dale was a co-founder and the first editor of their computing trade books. When not in the office, Dale can be found making award-winning wines with his family in Sebastopol, CA.

Once upon a time, interacting anonymously online meant talking to strangers who could be anywhere in the world and knew very little about you, and about whom you knew very little. Thanks to GPS, ubiquitous mobile devices and an array of recent apps, however, we can now very easily connect anonymously with friends and strangers who are physically nearby. And as anybody who has read reports of (or experienced) cyberbullying or used apps like Grindr/Tinder/Scruff to meet, um, friends can tell you, local anonymity is very different. In this talk I will be reporting on several recent studies of activity on Facebook and Grindr that explore how location-awareness and interacting with local strangers affects the nature of our interactions and self-presentation. Results suggest that people may feel more free to discuss sensitive topics or explore stigmatized identities when anonymous, but that also being local increases their concerns about being recognized by others. Bio: Jeremy Birnholtz is an associate professor in the departments of communication studies and electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University. He recently served as a visiting professor on the core data science team at Facebook. His research aims to improve the usefulness and usability of communication and collaboration tools, via a focus on understanding and exploiting mechanisms of human attention and identity management. Jeremy's work has been published in the ACM CHI, CSCW and Group Proceedings, as well as in Organization Science, HCI, JASIST, JCMC, and Computers in Human Behavior. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Google, Facebook and the US Department of Agriculture.

The extent to which we are subject to surveillance — the collection of information about us, by government, commercial, or individual agents — is in large part an economic question. Surveillance takes effort and resources — spend more and we can do better surveillance. Protecting against surveillance also takes effort and resources. Given the state of technology, the amount of effort and money each side expends determines what is surveilled and what is kept private. As technology changes, both the cost and the desirability of surveillance, and protection against surveillance, change. We can confidently predict that information technology and communication costs will continue to decrease, and capabilities to surveil and protect against it will improve. What are the consequences for our privacy? Will we have a future with more or less privacy? Which do we want? Bio: Jeffrey MacKie-Mason will be joining UC Berkeley on October 1 as University Librarian and Chief Digital Scholarship Officer. For the past 29 years, Jeff has been a faculty member at the University of Michigan, where he was the Arthur W. Burks Collegiate Professor of Information and Computer Science, and also a professor of economics and a professor of public policy. For the last five years he has been the dean of Michigan’s School of Information. Jeff has been a pioneering scholar of the economics of the Internet and online behavior and a frequent co-author with the Berkeley I School’s first dean, Hal Varian. He has also led the development of the incentive-centered design approach to online information services.

Bob Bell & Stuart Geiger (Ph.D. 2015) look back on their years of doctoral study and what they've learned.

Sharon X. Lin (MIDS 2015) reflects on being the very first class of the School's data science master's program.

Robyn Perry (MIMS 2015) gives her classmates “one last good ideological brainwashing” and challenges them to “combine idealism with entrepreneurialism and find practical ways to make the world a better place — instead of just devising new ways to make people click on ads.”

Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, reflects on the power of information and challenges the I School's 2015 graduates to use that power for good.

In this talk, Hugh Williams shares over ten years of experience in using customer data to improve product experiences and drive business results. He shares stories of both quantitatively and qualitatively understanding customers, and how the large Internet giants experiment, measure, and improve their experiences. He talks about flaws and stories of failed experimentation, and the pitfalls of large scale measurement. He also discusses his career as an executive at Microsoft, eBay, and Pivotal, and talks about what he plans to do next. A significant part of the talk will be interactive, with plenty of time for questions and discussion. This talk was a guest lecture for the course Info 296A. Data Science and Analytics: Thought Leaders. Hugh E. Williams has spent twenty years researching and developing search engines, web services, and big data technologies. From 2009 to 2013, Hugh was with eBay. He led a large cross-disciplinary team that turned-around the Marketplaces business. His teams conceived, designed, and built eBay’s user experiences, search engine, big data technologies, and platforms. Prior to eBay, he spent 4+ years managing a search engine R&D team at Microsoft’s Bing, 10+ years researching and developing search technologies, and 5 years running his own startup and consultancy. He has published over 100 works, mostly in the field of information retrieval, including two books, Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL and Learning Mysql, for O’Reilly Media, Inc. He holds nineteen US patents and has many more pending. He has a Ph.D. from RMIT University in Australia.

“Your data will only be used in aggregated form.” What does this statement mean, and why is it so often included in privacy policies? Drawing from examples in the popular press and the technical literature, the talk will scrutinize the common intuition that privacy is ensured by aggregation and show that information — and hence privacy loss — flows in mysterious ways. Arguing that the situation demands a mathematically rigorous treatment of privacy, the talk will introduce “differential privacy,” a field of research supporting a strong definition of privacy tailored to analysis of large data sets. This still-growing approach is thriving and is beginning to enter practice. Bio: Cynthia Dwork, a distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, is renowned for placing privacy-preserving data analysis on a mathematically rigorous foundation. A cornerstone of this work is differential privacy, a strong privacy guarantee frequently permitting highly accurate data analysis. Dr. Dwork has also made seminal contributions in cryptography and distributed computing, and is a recipient of the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, recognizing some of her earliest work establishing the pillars on which every fault-tolerant system has been built for decades. She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

You can buy the best hardware in the world, and hire the best mathematicians. You can write brilliant machine learning algorithms. However: if you do not have a way to produce information that is relevant to your organization and successfully communicate it to them, your entire data science department is the functional equivalent of a paperweight that costs more than raw plutonium. So let’s take a minute to talk about organizational structure, information flows, hiring, training, and data’s social signal-to-noise-ratio. Kimberly Stedman Data Scientist Motiga Kimberly Stedman does big data in the games industry. She was originally a field anthropologist, and has lived in five developing countries. Kim has a Master’s in Social and Organizational Systems Analysis. Kim specializes in the design and management of the social systems that surround data technologies. In other words: Awesome! We’ve got a better algorithm running on faster hardware! … Now what? Kim gave a 5-minute Ignite talk on this topic: How to Build an Effective Data Science Department. Kim also blogs as K2. She wrote Brosie the Riveter, a comedic article on gender issues in gaming and STEM.

Protecting privacy and civil liberties cannot and should not be left to the lawyers. Given the rapid pace of technological innovation and the glacially slow development of corresponding legal doctrine, it falls to engineers and technologists to consider privacy and civil liberties issues as they design, build, and sell their ideas. In the course of this audience discussion, we will explore a hypothetical situation involving both business and design choices and consider the challenges in charting the most ethical course. John Grant Civil Liberties Engineer Palantir Technologies John joined Palantir Technologies in September 2010 as the company’s first Civil Liberties Engineer. Previously, John served for nearly a decade as an advisor in the United States Senate. He began his career in the Senate as an aide to Senator Peter Fitzgerald before joining the staff of former presidential candidate and member of the Senate Republican leadership, Senator Lamar Alexander. While working for Senator Alexander on issues ranging from the federal budget to homeland security, John attended law school at Georgetown University. He earned his law degree shortly after joining the staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. As Counsel to Ranking Member Senator Susan Collins, John handled the Committee’s intelligence and privacy and civil liberties portfolios. He conducted oversight of numerous programs within the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. intelligence community as well as investigations into intelligence failures that led to the attacks at Fort Hood and the failed 2009 Christmas Day bombings. As a Civil Liberties Engineer at Palantir, John has worked with customers all over the world, helping them to develop data protection practices that make the best use of Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties protective capabilities.

Making decisions based on correlation can be risky. At Airbnb, a two-sided marketplace with both an online and offline travel experience, engineers have found that experiments provide powerful insights to act upon, by making it possible to distinguish correlation from causation. However, it’s important to be especially thoughtful about the design and implementation of experiments, given the complexity of the Airbnb system. Elena Grewal, data scientist at Airbnb, will discuss how the Airbnb data science team uses experimentation to inform business and product decisions. Learn how Airbnb uses experiments in non-traditional settings, how experiments enable sound decision making across the company, and how the team has learned the potential pitfalls of experiment analysis along the way. Elena Grewal Data Science Manager Airbnb Elena Grewal is a data science manager at Airbnb. She leads a team of data scientists responsible for the online experience and offline travel experience. Her team collaborates with the product team, using experimentation and descriptive analysis to design and optimize the site, in addition to validating future product plans and inspiring those plans with exploratory analysis. The team is also responsible for data-driven products, such as pricing suggestions and search ranking algorithms. Prior to working at Airbnb, Elena completed a doctorate in education at Stanford where she built predictive models of friendships in schools.

The movement known as “open data” started with a handful of governments releasing their data to the public. On one hand, open data has spurred innovative uses of government data, particularly with transit data and apps. But to expand the use and value of open data, we must go beyond mobile apps to leveraging open data as a means to inform public dialogue and decision-making in cities. Learn how San Francisco is migrating from simply pushing data out the door to enabling use of our (that is, your) data. Joy Bonaguro Chief Data Officer City and County of San Francisco Joy Bonaguro is the first Chief Data Officer for the City and County of San Francisco, where she manages the City’s open data program. Joy has spent more than a decade working at the nexus of public policy, data, and technology. She’s worked from the birth of the open data and open government field, spending seven years designing and managing the development of information systems to support planning and decision-making at the Greater New Orleans Community Data. Prior to joining the City, Joy worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to help develop technology, cyber and privacy policy working closely with both the National Lab CIO Council and the Department of Energy Information Management Advisory Group. Joy earned her Masters from UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, where she focused on IT policy.

The data science toolkit encompasses powerful approaches for detecting and clarifying patterns in social or behavioral data. But when it comes to the interpretation of those patterns, it sometimes falls short — the data may convey “what” and “how much” with great precision, but it is often silent on “why” and “how.” Complementary research methods can fill in these gaps and paint a fuller picture of the phenomena at hand. At Facebook, we combine data science with qualitative and quantitative research, often iteratively, to gain a deeper understanding not just of what people are doing on Facebook, but why and how. Judd Antin UX Research Manager Facebook Judd Antin is a UX Research Manager at Facebook, where he focuses on bring the theories and practices of social psychology, social computing, and HCI to bear to improve Facebook’s products. Judd and his team employ methods that range from ethnographic fieldwork to big data analysis to understand products like News Feed, Ads, Photos, and Groups. In 2011, Judd was named one of MIT Technology Reviews Top Innovators Under 35 (TR35). Judd holds a Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Information, where his research focused on collective action, social dilemmas, and incentive systems in online collaboration. Judd also holds an MA in Applied Anthropology from the University of Maryland College Park, and a BA in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University. Andrew T. Fiore Growth Research Team Lead Facebook Andrew T. Fiore leads Facebook’s Growth Research Team, including a program of research to understand and measure the benefits, risks, and barriers to adoption of information and communication technologies in emerging markets. Previously, as a member of the data science team at Facebook, he studied social dynamics in online groups. His past research at UC Berkeley, the MIT Media Lab, and Microsoft Research focused on the design and analysis of behavior in computer-mediated communication systems, including usenet newsgroups and online dating sites. He holds a Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Information, as well as an M.A. in statistics from UC Berkeley, an M.S. in media arts and sciences from MIT, and a B.A. from Cornell University.

A rise in chronic conditions has put a strain on our healthcare system. Treatment for chronic conditions spans time, agencies, and providers. Information systems such as electronic health records should be helping with the challenge of coordination, but too often they do not. My research aims to alleviate this problem by designing health information systems that fit social practices and workflow. In this talk I will describe my research agenda around collaborative reflection – an informal, unpredictable, and adaptive type of decision-making. I have studied collaborative reflection in behavioral and mental health services for children, which are coordinated across clinical, home, and special education settings. Through participatory design I developed Lilypad, a tablet-based information system for collaborative reflection. I then examined the social impact of Lilypad using deployment studies. I will discuss what the Lilypad project tells us about the way health information systems should be designed and integrated within health service organizations, if they are to have a positive impact on stakeholders involved with managing chronic conditions. Bio: Gabriela Marcu is an assistant professor in the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University. She obtained her Ph.D. in human-computer interaction this year from Carnegie Mellon University, and her B.S. in informatics from UC Irvine in 2009. Her interdisciplinary research addresses problems in the coordination of health services. She combines computer science with anthropology and design, to develop and study sociotechnical solutions to real-world problems. She has been named a Siebel Scholar, NSF Graduate Research Fellow, Microsoft Research Graduate Women Scholar, and a Google Anita Borg Scholar.

In his doctoral dissertation, Kai Huotari studied how TV live-tweeting influenced the TV viewing experience. He interviewed 45 live-tweeters and analyzed more than 4,000 TV live-tweets sent in the U.S. in 2011–12. The study identified four distinct groups of users live-tweeting about TV programs (fanatic TV live-tweeters, systematic TV live-tweeters, sporadic TV live-tweeters, and active Twitter users), four main categories of TV live-tweets (courtesy tweets, outlet tweets, selection tweets, and analysis tweets), described several TV live-tweeting practices from preparation practices to reading and writing live-tweets and to the use of Twitter functions, and revealed that a TV live-tweeter is an empowered TV viewer who can, by experientializing live-tweeting into his or her TV viewing, personalize and control his or her TV-viewing experience better than before, express him- or herself more fully, and reach a large enough audience and acceptance for his or her ideas.

Jake Peterson discusses the Facebook analytics team and how they perform large scale data analysis, identify actionable insights, suggest recommendations, and influence the direction of the business. The Facebook analytics team serves as the voice of data that drives success throughout the company, including product development, user engagement, growth, revenue, and operations. Learn about their typical day-to-day responsibilities, challenges, and how best to succeed as a data scientist in analytics. Jake Peterson is a data scientist and analytics engineering manager at Facebook and has been working in data science for more than ten years — longer than “data science” has been a term. At Facebook, Jake has led data science for four different Facebook product teams, most recently for the Graph Search product. Prior to Facebook, Jake led analytics functions at several tech startups and spent six years in the direct marketing industry as an analytics consultant at Acxiom. He holds a B.S. in computer science and a B.A. in philosophy from Santa Clara University.

What does the recent battle for patent reform mean for startups and for the future of tech policy? Julie Samuels is executive director and president of the board of Engine, a young and influential advocacy group working to ensure startups have a voice in D.C. Through policy analysis, economic research, and close relationships with policymakers and startups, Engine is helping to elevate the interests of technology entrepreneurship in American policy. Julie gives an overview of the recent battle in Washington for patent reform and talk about lessons learned. She discusses what the battle means for technology and startup policy going forward — and explains why startups and businesses need to stay involved in the fight for change in D.C.

A panel of women data scientists discuss their career trajectories in the emerging and rapidly evolving field of data science. Panelists: Katharine Matsumoto, Data Scientist in Product Intelligence, Salesforce.com Vesela Gateva, Sr. Data Scientist, Eventbrite Emi Nomura, Data Scientist, Jawbone Elena Grewal, Data Scientist, Airbnb Pinar Donmez, Chief Data Scientist, Kabbage, Inc Anno Saxenian, Dean, School of Information (moderator)

Meet Eric Liu and Paul Duan of Bayes Impact, a non-profit organization deploying data science teams to work with civic and nonprofit organizations to solve big social impact challenges. They’ll talk about how Bayes Impact’s full-time fellowship programs bring together domain experts and data scientists from top technology companies and academic institutions and how I School students can get involved.

MIMS student speaker Deb Linton, from the UC Berkeley School of Information 2014 Commencement (May 17, 2014).

From the UC Berkeley School of Information 2014 Commencement (May 17, 2014). Keynote Speaker Nicole Wong is the deputy US chief technology officer, advising on Internet policy and privacy. Prior to joining the Obama administration, Nicole was the legal director at Twitter and vice president and deputy general counsel at Google, primarily responsible for the company’s product and regulatory matters. She is also a former partner at the law firm of Perkins Coie. Nicole is a frequent speaker and author on issues related to law and technology, including multiple appearances before the US Congress regarding Internet policy, censorship and privacy. She has taught media and Internet law and policy courses at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of San Francisco. She is a member of the advisory board to the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and has served on the governing committee of the ABA Communication Law Forum and the board of directors of the First Amendment Coalition. Nicole received her law degree and a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley and her Bachelor of Arts degree from Georgetown University.

When Time Magazine named “YOU” as their 2006 Person of the Year, it highlighted what has been deemed the democratization of the media. The term “Web 2.0” was coined to describe this transformation on the internet, where individual volunteers, not institutions, control its content. But many people share doubts about the hype around Web 2.0 and have different ideas about what's significant, what's trivial, and what's irrelevant. Protagonists, such as Andrew Keen, believe that it is not only significant, but is significant enough to threaten “our economy, our culture, and our values.” Please join UC Berkeley Adjunct Professor Paul Duguid and Andrew Keen in a debate about whether Web 2.0 is truly a threat to our culture. Adjunct Professor Geoffrey Nunberg will moderate the debate. Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Information, the Berkeley Center for New Media, Mass Communications at UC Berkeley, and the UC Berkeley Library

Experience designers and researchers are working on their most ambitious challenge yet that represents a new frontier in user interfaces: creating a constellation of systems, machines, and people — including wearable gadgets, tablets, smart phones, and appliances — that can communicate with one another in an autonomous fashion. We are constantly adding new functions to gadgets and new devices to the ecosystem without much thought as to their totality or cumulative complexity. In the coming era of ubiquitous sensors and miniaturized mobile computing, designers need to think about how to weave the digital world into our lives at work so seamlessly that we don’t even notice. Already we’re seeing a groundswell of new technologies that insinuate themselves seamlessly into users’ personal lives like the voice and gesture-controlled Xbox, but this is just the beginning. At GE, we want to apply the same embedded intelligence to the world of big iron and people at work to create disruptive experiences, not just products or interfaces, by connecting people with people and people with machines and data. In this talk you will learn how GE Global Research is pursuing new opportunities in analytics visualization, the future of field engineering, wearables, robotics, semiautonomous vehicles, and agents that can be applied to the industrial Internet. Bio: Arnold Lund, Ph.D., CUXP, is the connected experience technology leader and human-systems interaction lab manager at GE Global Research. He was previously the principal user experience lead in Microsoft’s Server and Management Studios and the principal director of user experience in Microsoft’s IT organization. Prior to that, he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Ameritech, US West Advanced Technologies, and Sapient. His research has been recognized by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), and his work on metrics for assessing user experiences and predicting successful products continues to be influential. Lund is a fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), and served on the HFES Executive Council. He has been elected to the prestigious ACM SIGCHI Academy and recently received the SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award. He has long been engaged in human computer interaction (HCI) and human factors standards, and in the area of accessibility and emerging technology. He chaired the HFES Institute and oversaw the HFES-200 standard and its approval as an ANSI standard. He is a certified user experience professional and served as president of the board of directors for the Board of Certification in Professional Ergonomics (BCPE). Lund has published widely in R&D management and on research in natural user interfaces, and has more than 20 patents. He has taught user-centered design at Northwestern University and the University of Washington.

What is new about how teenagers communicate through services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Do social media affect the quality of teens’ lives? Youth culture and technology expert danah boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens’ use of social media. In her new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, boyd explores tropes about identity, privacy, safety, danger, and bullying. Ultimately, she argues that society fails young people when paternalism and protectionism hinder teenagers’ ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens through their online interactions. Bio: Dr. danah boyd is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, a research assistant professor at New York University, a fellow of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and an alumna of the UC Berkeley School of Information (Ph.D. ’08). Dr. boyd is “the reigning expert on how young people use the Internet,” according to Fortune Magazine, which named her the smartest academic in tech. The Washington Post dubbed boyd “the high priestess of social networking.” Her research focuses on how youth integrate technology into their everyday practices and other interactions between technology and society.

This workshop was the last in a series of three events co-hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and academic institutions across the country in response to President Obama’s call for a review of privacy issues in the context of increased digital information and the computing power to process it. --- Hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the UC Berkeley School of Information, and the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. --- The closing keynote was delivered by John Podesta. John Podesta is currently counselor to the president. In 2008, he served as co-chair of President Obama’s transition team. Previously, Podesta served as White House chief of staff to President William J. Clinton. --- Video of all of the day's sessions are available at http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/2014bigdataworkshop

The dissemination of reproducible computational research — where the code and data that generated the results are made conveniently available — is now widely recognized as a transformative movement within the scientific community. It is attracting attention not only from researchers but also from librarians and repository managers, journal editorial boards, funding agencies and policy makers, and scientific software developers. This talk motivates the rationale for this shift, and presents solutions I have been developing to facilitate reliable and re-usable computational research including: new empirical findings on changes to journal data and code publication policies; best practices for code and data release; the open source dissemination and access tool ResearchCompendia.org; and the "Reproducible Research Standard" for ensuring the distribution of legally usable data and code. Some of these results are described in the forthcoming co-edited books Implementing Reproducible Research and Privacy, Big Data, and the Public Good. Bio: Victoria Stodden is assistant professor of statistics at Columbia University and serves as a member of the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI), and on Columbia University’s Senate Information Technologies Committee. She is one of the creators of SparseLab, a collaborative platform for reproducible computational research and has developed an award winning licensing structure to facilitate open and reproducible computational research, called the Reproducible Research Standard. She is currently working on the NSF-funded project “Policy Design for Reproducibility and Data Sharing in Computational Science.” Victoria co-chaired a working group on Virtual Organizations for the NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on Grand Challenge Communities in 2010. She is a Science Commons fellow and a nominated member of the Sigma Xi scientific research society. She also serves on the advisory board for hackNY.org, and on the joint advisory committee for the NSF's EarthCube, the effort to build a geosciences-integrating cyberinfrastructure. She is an editorial board member for Open Research Computation and Open Network Biology. She completed her Ph.D. and law degrees at Stanford University. Her Erdös Number is 3.

Ongoing national and global cyberinfrastructure initiatives pose significant information organization challenges. Research targeting metadata helps address these challenges. This presentation covers a set of studies investigating technical, conceptual, and semantic-driven metadata solutions for organizing the deluge of digital data. The presentation introduces the Dryad data repository and the HIVE ontology environment; outlines motivating research questions and methods; and highlights key findings to date, noting the wider implications of this work. Further, I will describe new research emphases, including work as a Data Science Fellow at the National Consortium for Data Science, in affiliation with the Renaissance Computing Institute in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I conclude by discussing how research focusing on metadata is an integral component of information organization and integrates with the I School environment.

For most of history, health care was centered around the doctor’s office or hospital. It was the era of the lone practitioner, the omniscient physician to whom patients turned to treat their ailments. That was the industrial age of medicine. Today, health care is much more complex. The proliferation of information available to physicians and to their patients has fundamentally shifted the locus of information and power to patients. In the information age of medicine, we must optimize the use of information, technology, tools, and teams. We need to turn masses of patient data, science, and clinical evidence into clinical knowledge. This information must be available to patients, physicians, and care teams. And they must have access to technology and tools to make the right thing easier to do. Health care must transform in order to meet the challenges of the information age and to address the crisis of affordability and value in health care. We must become a learning industry. We need to draw from all parts of the industry; harnessing our collective knowledge, working collaboratively, and learning together. We can’t treat our way out of the health care crisis. We must learn our way out of it.

Many companies and observers are excited about the possibility of competitive advantage from analytics on "big data," but many don’t understand the differences between big and small data analytics. There are also substantial differences in how large, established organizations and startups approach big data. In this presentation, Tom Davenport will describe what organizations are attempting to accomplish with big data. Several leading examples of companies—large firms and startup—that are aggressively pursuing big data will be presented. Davenport will then describe how big data differs from previous approaches to analytics and data management on small data. Finally, he'll address some of the key factors that big and small data analytics have in common, and will describe his ideas on their integration using the “Analytics 3.0” framework he has developed.

Catalyst is a £1.9M UK funded research project looking at how digital technologies either promote or act as a barrier to social change. Catalyst has developed a novel approach to such research which involves building partnerships of academics and non-academics (community organizations, charities, social enterprises etc.) to jointly imagine and develop digital technologies to address particular social agendas. Catalyst is run as a framework of projects — or sprints — in which teams form and very quickly work together on new ideas with long term sustainability in mind from the start. To date, Catalyst has involved around 70 community groups as well as academics from seven different disciplines (computing, psychology, sociology, management, health and medicine, art and design, linguistics). Projects to date have worked with charities for the homeless, adults on the autism spectrum, local sustainability initiatives, and the use of social media to connect communities. In this talk, Jon Whittle gives an overview of the Catalyst project, describes its methods and approaches, and reflects on what has been learned about doing research with and for communities outside the university.

How should we strike the right balance between national security and privacy and civil liberties in federal counterterrorism programs? Join members of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to discuss the importance of government transparency regarding counterterrorism efforts, international issues raised by US surveillance programs, the impact of NSA programs on US industry and the Internet, and the Board’s role going forward. The U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is a bipartisan independent federal agency. Chairman David Medine and board members Rachel Brand, Elisebeth Collins Cook, and James Dempsey will discuss the Board's recent report and recommendations on the NSA telephony metadata program and reform of the operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

David Reiley presents the results of a randomized experiment with 1.6 million customers measuring positive causal effects of online advertising for a major retailer. The advertising profitably increases purchases by 5%. 93% of the increase occurs in brick-and-mortar stores; 78% of the increase derives from consumers who never click the ads. This large sample reaches the statistical frontier for measuring economically relevant effects. Econometric efficiency was improved by supplementing experimental variation with non-experimental variation caused by consumer browsing behavior. This experiment provides a specification check for observational difference-in-differences and cross-sectional estimators; the latter exhibits a large negative bias three times the estimated experimental effect.

A timely and engaging conversation with Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties director at the ACLU of Northern California. We will be exploring the latest updates related to NSA spying — what we now know, what we still don’t know, and opportunities in Congress, the courts, companies, and in communities to rein in warrantless surveillance and better safeguard privacy and free speech.

Big data brings us challenges, but also hopes. This talk discusses these challenges and hopes from the semantic perspective. I will present two use cases to demonstrate the potential of semantic technologies for data integration and data analysis. The first use case discusses how to integrate researcher profiling data from different universities using their faculty annual report data. The second use case focuses on how to integrate public knowledge embedded in experimental data and literature data to facilitate drug discovery. It highlights some foreseeable future changes for search and some issues that urgently need to be solved.

How is the Internet experienced in the margins of the global economy? In her new book, Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana, I School professor Jenna Burrell presents a user study set initially in the Internet cafés of Accra, Ghana but gradually expanded to include roadside youth clubs, churches, secondhand computer shops, and electronic waste dumps. This talk offers two threads of analysis from the book. First, an examination of the youth who used the Internet in these spaces to cultivate foreign contacts through Yahoo! chatrooms and dating sites and how they made sense of the frequent and often sudden breakdowns in their online relationships. Second, an argument for the supply of secondhand computers imported from abroad by Ghanaian transnational family businesses as a process innovation that made the Internet cafés materially feasible despite Ghana’s economic and infrastructural limitations. The book bridges between science and technology studies and African studies to demonstrate how studying spaces of cultural discontinuity and where the more erratic processes of globalization operate can contribute new insights to the way we theorize about users.

What role will museums and libraries play in the information technology landscape of the future? Todd Carter presents his vision of museums and libraries empowered by Web 2.0 and crowd-sourcing technologies. He will focus on improving media annotation with open-sourced anthologies, linked open data, tagging with linked data URIs, semantics, machines, and crowd-sourced human computation. Todd Carter is the CEO and co-founder of Tagasauris, Inc., a metadata curation platform that incorporates crowd-sourcing, machine learning, linked open data, and the semantic web. Todd is widely respected as a leader in the digital asset, photography, and linked open data community, with over 20 years experience working with photo archives, libraries, museums, and information technology systems. Tagasauris has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, Business Week, The Economist and others. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Tagasauris and The Museum of the City of New York a grant to annotate the museum's archive. Tagasauris is rolling out it's first photo product in 2012 and hopes to be a game-changer in the media industry.

Join us for a discussion with author Howard Rheingold. In his new book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, Rheingold asks, how can we use digital media so that they help us become empowered participants rather than passive consumers; grounded, well-rounded people rather than multitasking neurotics? In Net Smart, he demonstrates how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully. Mindful use of digital media means thinking about what we are doing, cultivating an ongoing inner inquiry into how we want to spend our time. Rheingold outlines five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or "crap detection"), and network smarts. He explains how attention works, and how we can use our attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information. He describes the quality of participation that empowers the best of the bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online community participants; he examines how successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways; and he presents a lesson on networks and network building. There is a bigger social issue at work in digital literacy, one that goes beyond personal empowerment. If we combine our individual efforts wisely, it could produce a more thoughtful society: countless small acts like publishing a Web page or sharing a link could add up to a public good that enriches everybody.

Everything we do online leaves traces: our tweets, Facebook likes, and YouTube views. Currently, Big Data is all about sifting through cloud stores of these traces with little question as to why those traces exist. Big Data analyses are based on data that are already collected; they are not about asking what should be collected to answer important social and motivational questions. I ask: What motivates people to do what they do? And how can we build predictive models of what people do based on their contextualized and emerging interests, and not just their numerical data. Finding the reasons why people do what they do, and why they create the data trails in the first place, invites a new set of questions and demands a new set of methods. I present investigations into uncovering and understanding these motivations through three areas of inquiry: genre classification, topic prediction, and event detection. I propose changes for how we measure engagement, how we design system instrumentation, and how we design for data collection, aggregation and summarization. These changes have immediate implications on how we understand human behavior online and build new experiences, and they bring ramifications for the next generation of large data solutions.

There is a great realignment happening that is changing the way the world sees itself. This realignment is the product of economic globalization, amazing advances in technology and the end of a monistic media age. The world has, for a generation, been dominated by massive Western media companies who control the most influential media: television. In the coming years, television will realign alongside social media to a pluralistic world media culture within which many new narratives will vie for our attention. Whenever media evolves so does society. There are major challenges ahead for the simplistic binary narratives spun by television, good vs. evil, black vs. white, red vs. blue, right vs. wrong. Humanity is more complex that that, and we will be confronting that complexity head-on from now on.

A global struggle for control of the Internet is now underway. At stake are no less than civil liberties, privacy, and even the character of democracy in the 21st century. Many commentators have debated whether the Internet is ultimately a force for freedom of expression and political liberation, or for alienation, and repression. Rebecca MacKinnon, author of the new book Consent of the Networked, moves the debate about the Internet’s political impact to a new level. It is time, she says, to stop arguing over whether the Internet empowers individuals and societies, and address the more fundamental and urgent question of how technology should be structured and governed to support the rights and liberties of all the world’s Internet users. Drawing upon two decades of experience as an international journalist, co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices, Chinese Internet censorship expert, and Internet freedom activist, MacKinnon offers a framework for concerned citizens to understand the complex and often hidden power dynamics amongst governments, corporations, and citizens in cyberspace. She warns that a convergence of unchecked government actions and unaccountable company practices threatens the future of democracy and human rights around the world. Our freedom in the Internet age depends on whether we defend our rights on digital platforms and networks in the same way that people fight for their rights and accountable governance in physical communities and nations, claims MacKinnon. It is time to stop thinking of ourselves as passive “users” of technology and instead act like citizens of the Internet — as netizens — and take ownership and responsibility for our digital future.

Scientific computation is emerging as absolutely central to the scientific method, but the prevalence of very relaxed practices is leading to a credibility crisis affecting many scientific fields. It is impossible to verify most of the results that computational scientists present at conferences and in papers today. Reproducible computational research, in which all details of computations — code and data — are made conveniently available to others, is necessary for a resolution of this crisis. This requires a multifaceted approach including policy solutions, computational tools for data and code dissemination, curation and archiving, and open licensing frameworks such as the Reproducible Research Standard.

Howard Rheingold offers a glimpse of the future of high-end online learning in which motivated self-learners collaborate via a variety of social media to create, deliver, and learn an agreed curriculum: a mutant variety of pedagogy that more closely resembles a peer-agogy. Rheingold proposes that our intention should be to teach ourselves how to teach ourselves online, and to share what we learn. He will show how the use of social media in courses he has taught about social media issues led him to co-redesign his curriculum, which led to more active participation by students in co-teaching the course.