May 2, 2017
Today we had our 1st Data Science for the 21st Century Program Conference. Some cool things that I learned:
- Cathryn Carson updated us on the status of the Data Science program on campus - we are teaching 1200 freshman data science right now. Amazing. And a new Dean is coming.
- Phil Stark on the danger of being at the bleeding edge of computation - if you put all your computational power into your model, you have nothing left to evaluate uncertainty in your model. Let science guide data science.
- David Ackerly believes in social networking!
- Cheryl Schwab gave us an summary of her evaluation work. The program outcomes that we are looking for in the program are: Concepts, communication, interdisciplinary research
- Trevor Houser from the Rhodian Group http://rhg.com/people/trevor-houser gave a very interesting and slightly optimistic view of climate change.
- Break out groups, led by faculty:
- (Boettiger) Data Science Grand Challenges: inference vs prediction; dealing with assumptions; quantifying uncertainty; reproducibility, communication, and collaboration; keeping science in data science; and keeping scientists in data science.
- (Hsiang) Civilization collapses through history:
- (Ackerly) Discussion on climate change and land use. 50% of the earth are either crops or rangelands; and there is a fundamental tradeoff between land for food and wildlands. How do we deal with the externalities of our love of open space (e.g. forcing housing into the central valley).
- Finally, we wrapped up with presentations from our wonderful 1st cohort of DS421 students and their mini-graduation ceremony.
- Plus WHAT A GREAT DAY! Berkeley was splendid today in the sun.