Communications of the ACM
With Student Interest Soaring, C Berkeley Creates New Data-Sciences Division
More and more students at UC Berkeley are interested in data science, school officials say.
The University of California at Berkeley announced a new Division of Data Science and Information. It is the university's largest program change in decades and helps secure its status among the United States' top data-science research and training hubs.
"The division will enable students and researchers to tackle not just the scientific challenges opened up by pervasive data, but the societal, economic, and environmental impacts as well," the university said.
Berkeley is in an elite group with Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, Stanford, and the University of Washington in the caliber and scope of its data-science program, said Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a computer-science professor at the University of Washington, and a tech entrepreneur. In creating the new division, Berkeley is responding to two issues, Etzioni said. The first is a large, chronic shortage of well-trained data scientists. The second is what value a university can add when technical courses are widely available through platforms like Coursera and Udacity.
Leaders at Berkeley say their disclosure of the division was driven by an imminent international search for a director, who will hold the title of associate provost, putting the program on an institutional par with Berkeley's colleges and schools.
Berkeley has been planning the division for four years, corresponding to growth in its data-science courses. Enrollment in "Foundations of Data Science" has soared from 100 in 2015 to 1,300 in 2018. Enrollment in the upper-level "Principles and Techniques of Data Science" has grown from 100 in 2016 to 800 students.
Paul Alivisatos, Berkeley's executive vice chancellor and provost, said there are 11 data-science-related faculty searches in the works.
From The Chronicle of Higher Education
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