Data Science Discovery Program

Summer 2019 applications for students are open through 5/1!

The Data Science Discovery Program connects undergraduates with hands-on, team-based opportunities to contribute to cutting-edge data research projects with graduate and post-doctoral students, community impact groups, entrepreneurial ventures, and educational initiatives across UC Berkeley.

Upcoming Summer 2019 Projects

Bay Area Trip Choice Model

There are many externalities from driving; time lost in traffic, climate emissions, local air pollution and more. This project aims to aid policymakers working to limit these ills and improve travel in the Bay Area, particularly through pricing policies – adjustments in tolls, parking rates, etc. We aim to build a simplified commute model by simulating how people get to work. Options such as driving, taking transit (etc.) and the monetary and time cost of each can be constructed through a mapping API.

Cal Alumni Association Data Science Project

The Cal Alumni Association Data Science Project is a collaboration between the UC Berkeley Division of Data Sciences and Cal Alumni Association to assess the correlations between participation in alumni engagement activities and CAA mission fulfillment.

Cybersecurity Imagery

How does society visually represent "cybersecurity?" Working on a set of images collected from two years of cybersecurity-related term searches, this project seeks to better understand our perceptions toward cybersecurity and how they affect the ways we think and act on it.

west big data innovation hub

Economics of Disaster Response

Working with West Big Data Innovation Hub and the State of California to address how we can better respond to natural disasters. Goals include finding ways to better optimize the demand and supply of physical donations and understanding the economics of disaster prevention and relief.

Fall Armyworm

Currently, over 300 million Sub-Saharan Africans depend on maize as their primary staple food crop. In 2016, a pest indigenous to the Americas called the Fall Armyworm (FAW) arrived in West Africa and has been spreading at breathtaking speed, attacking maize in 44 African countries in just one year. Students will help MercyCorps create a tool to help indicate the location and intensity of FAW outbreaks and help identify the risks of future outbreaks to enable humanitarian organizations to effectively target resources.

Quantitative Impacts of Breaches in Publicly-Traded Companies

Everyone expects that a security breach at Firm X will be followed by a sharp but short decline in the stock price of Company X. Competing firms especially pay attention when these breaches happen within their industry. But how might the market of the entire industry be affected? This project seeks to quantify the impacts of breaches in 'adjacent firms' to the overall market of an industry and assess if there are any lasting impacts in addition to short term declines.

Water Data Collaborative

California State Water Resources Control Board seeks to create comprehensive, high-quality data on water rates for agencies across the state. This will allow easy interoperability in joining water use, income, and other demographic data sets.

whave

Work At Home Vintage Experts

WAHVE pairs companies looking for specific skills with the veteran talent who have them. Businesses get the quality and knowledge they need, while ”vintage” professionals (people over 50) get to phase into retirement working from their home office. We have analyzed over 52,692 unique applicants and are looking to for students to participate in NLP analysis of the data.

Why Discovery?

Data science is an intrinsically interdisciplinary field with broad reach, fast scaling capacity, and a large pool of interested students and projects. The Data Science Discovery Program, a joint effort of the Berkeley Institute for Data Sciences, Division of Data Sciences, and Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP), was created in 2015 to offer undergraduates the opportunity to build and apply data science skills and at the same time to provide collaborators with skilled students to help address their data challenges. 

Earn Academic Units

Students can earn units through the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP) page under the Division of Data Sciences. As a long as you use that URAP, you can be considered for all the projects in the Discovery Program.  

Research Partners

The Data Science Discovery Experiences model can identify, connect, and scale access for significantly more students in the data science space. It does so by creating a sustainable and diverse pipeline of projects by improving the matching and database system, fine-tuning the training and consulting services needed by graduate students, postdocs, and undergraduate research leads, and expanding internal and public communication. 

Research projects with faculty, post-doctoral, and graduate students encompass all domain areas. Social Impact efforts with community non-profit groups offer the opportunity to help address critical issues. 

Email questions to: ds-discovery@berkeley.edu

Student Application

Partner Application

Research Highlights

Data Sciences Discovery Showcase

Discovery Projects by Semester

a student presenting their research project to another student at the spring 2018 data scholars project showcase

Spring 2019 Projects

Four students gathering around a laptop, laughing, at the Spring 2018 semester Data Scholars project showcase.

Spring 2018 Projects

Fall 2017 Projects

Discovery

Spring 2017 Projects