As CSE gets ready to offer an undergraduate degree in Data Science, the program invited UC Berkeley professor John DeNero to speak on how the Berkeley campus reacted to his new Foundations of Data Science course (data8.org) -- the fastest growing elective course in UC Berkeley history, with over 1,700 students completing the course during the first four semesters it was offered.
DeNero will talk about the experience at 11AM on Thursday, May 4 in room 1202 of the CSE Building, with CSE Prof. Mohan Paturi as host. (Paturi is currently organizing the Data Science major/minor program for the CSE department.)
In his abstract for the talk, DeNero notes that the "course teaches students the fundamentals of programming and statistics together, leveraging sampling and simulation in order to reduce the amount of manual calculation required to reach statistical conclusions. The rapid growth of this course, along with a surge in student enthusiasm for data science, has inspired faculty from across campus to create a variety of new courses, ranging from small introductory seminars to upper-division project courses. This talk will first highlight some unique aspects of our foundations course, including recent improvements to its open-source software infrastructure. Then, we will discuss the design choices that have supported rapid development of a data science education program which combines new offerings with existing course resources.
Professor DeNero joined the UC Berkeley CS division faculty in 2014 to focus on undergraduate education in computer science. He received his Masters in Philosophy from Stanford University and his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2010. He is the author of Composing Programs (composingprograms.com) and co-author of Computational and Inferential Thinking (inferentialthinking.com), two online textbooks. His research focuses both on natural language processing and computer science education. Prior to Berkeley, DeNero was a senior research scientist at Google, working primarily on Google Translate and natural language processing.