Fall 2016 Courses

Designed for students from any major, Data 8 is an innovative introduction to core concepts of computer programming and statistics. Get hands-on experience working with data while exploring real-world issues ranging from racial profiling to social networks to California water usage.

Learn what it takes to run a “smart” city by working with data generated by transportation systems, power grids, and communications networks and through crowd-sensing and remote sensing technologies.

How does the human mind work? Find out by analyzing data relating to topics such as memory, rationality and irrationality, how objects and events are represented in the mind, and the relation of language and cognition.

Expands upon computer science topics covered in Foundations Data Science (Data 8), and provides an understanding of the structures that underlie the programs, algorithms, and languages used in data science and other settings.

From criminal justice to health care to municipal services, “civic tech” is transforming the public sector. Taught California Department of Justice experts, this course explores the emerging disciplines of data science, digital services, and user­-centered design and their implications for government and public policy.

Billions of people socialize “their” data with friends, companies, and the world. Explore the Social Data Revolution in a course taught by the former chief scientist at Amazon. Past guest speakers from LinkedIn, Reddit, Airbnb, Facebook, Uber, and more.

From Facebook’s “emotional contagion” experiment to search engine algorithms to self-driving cars, this course provides a survey of the critical ethical issues surrounding data and society.

How can we improve children’s health and learning in the developing world? Students will use the World Bank’s household survey data to explore relationships between nutrition and education outcomes and a variety of socioeconomic variables.

Genomics is triggering a revolution in medical discovery. Students will explore genomic data, including HIV genomics, personal genomics, and DNA forensics, as well as related legal and ethical issues. Biology background not required.

Insights from the study of social networks are used in a wide range of real-world settings, ranging from predicting and preventing the spread of Ebola, to convincing people to vote for a political candidate, to connecting people across the globe through Facebook. Learn how to work with social network data and why it’s useful.

Learn how the brain works and how you can use cutting-edge brain imaging and data analysis tools to study it. Students will learn how to formulate and test hypotheses about how the brain represents information, and perform analyses to derive conclusions.

This course will examine the rich history of human migration by focusing on the development of the U.S. population during the period following the Civil War. Learn how demographers use data to understand people’s lives in both the present and the past.

Expands upon statistics topics covered in Foundations Data Science (Data 8), with additional opportunities to work with real data. Topics include Bayes’ rule, correlations, the Central Limit Theorem, probabilistic models, symmetrics in random permutations, and more.

This course develops computational thinking and technical skills for senior undergraduates and graduate students who wish to pursue data-driven approaches to cognitive science and related disciplines. It introduces core ideas from probability theory, information theory, statistics, and machine learning, and explores the nature of human cognition from a computational perspective.

Students will analyze data from news, films, television, and social media, combining humanities and machine learning approaches. Students will learn how to craft high-level humanities queries, and design effective queries for large databases of words and images.