Largest gift in Berkeley’s history will create a ‘hub’ for advancing data science | Technology & engineering - UC Berkeley

Kara Manke, Berkeley News notes, Largest gift in Berkeley's history will create a 'hub' for advancing data science. 

A photo of a large auditorium filled with students all listening to a single speaker on stage.
Each year, more than 6,000 undergraduates complete a data science course at Berkeley, and many start with the wildly popular Foundations of Data Science class, also known as Data 8.
Photo: Jill Hodges

UC Berkeley’s Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) will soon have a brick-and-mortar home, thanks to an anonymous $252 million gift to seed the construction of a new “Data Hub” on the open space at the intersection of Hearst Avenue, Arch Street and MacFarlane Lane.

The donation, which represents the single largest gift in Berkeley’s history, will provide core funding for a sustainable, visually striking facility that will serve as a hub for the diverse array of students and faculty engaged in computing and data science research and teaching, and will provide a new anchor for Berkeley’s fastest-growing new areas of study.

“The Data Hub will be a magnet, bringing together scholars from disciplines across campus to forge new collaborations and take on some of the most critical questions facing society today, from biomedicine, to climate change and sustainability, to making data-informed public policy on issues of societal significance,” said Jennifer Chayes, associate provost for CDSS and dean of the School of Information. “We are immensely grateful for this generous anchor gift, which will help us make the Data Hub possible.”...

Across campus, researchers are advancing state of the art data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence and advanced statistics, and using them to tackle data sets and address questions that were once insurmountably complex, from public health and human welfare to fundamental science.
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Source: UC Berkeley