End of year social media posts

[KirstieJane]

I'm not great at writing these but SOMETHING like:

BIDS in 2025: Fast and effective connections: the NetworkX developers’ retreat in February 2025

Jarrod Millman [TAG] shared on the BIDS blog the NetworkX team's efforts to to unblock thorny development tasks, reflect on and update the project's long term vision, and spend time reconnecting in person in the beautiful Berkeley Hills.

The team were successful: Jarrod, Rick Ratzel [TAG], Dan Schult [TAG], Mridul Seth [TAG], and Stefan van der Walt [TAG] reviewed and merged 20 pull requests, and an additional 15 the following week! One of the notable pull requests was an algorithm - which runs 20 times faster than previous implementations - for calculating an approximate solution to the densest subgraph problem.

Check out the write up to understand more about how this open source Python package is enabling AI innovation around the world:

"At NVIDIA we’re supporting data scientists to speed up and scale their analyses with "zero code changes" required. By contributing to the NetworkX community we support users to unlock large graph analyses on GPU hardware using the same code they have previously used on CPUs." -- Rick Ratzel

https://bids.berkeley.edu/news/fast-and-effective-connections-networkx-developers%E2%80%99-retreat-february-2025

[lillihart]

AI template here

• Could use some review and improvements before the next one
• layout: BIDS in 2025 at top, tagline underneath, feature image from website

published posts:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7401426070769721344
https://bsky.app/profile/ucbids.bsky.social/post/3m6zhve37v22x

[KirstieJane]

BIDS in 2025: Welcoming a new executive director

In January 2025, Kirstie Whitaker [TAG] joined BIDS as executive director. No stranger to UC Berkeley [TAG], Kirstie received her PhD in neuroscience in 2012, before a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge [TAG Cambridge]. She then moved to The Alan Turing Institute [TAG] and led their Tools, Practices and Systems research program.

CDSS [TAG] interviewed Kirstie about her vision for BIDS and what she was most excited about:

"BIDS is well positioned to be a convener of disciplines – bringing people together, welcoming them, providing training that allow people to bridge different silos and different areas of expertise. We can also track these conversations and the long-term impact of bringing people together in order to work together."

"I’m excited about the vision that Fernando Pérez [TAG], BIDS faculty director, shared in positioning Berkeley to be a center of excellence for open scholarship, open source and interdisciplinary collaboration. Together with Tim Tangherlini [TAG], BIDS associate faculty director, we’re combining disciplines, expertise and opportunities in open-source data science with community-engaged scholarship."

https://cdss.berkeley.edu/news/meet-kirstie-whitaker-new-executive-director-bids

[lillihart]

published posts:
https://bsky.app/profile/ucbids.bsky.social/post/3m727gqzamk2w
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7401777171176054784

[KirstieJane]

BIDS in 2025: Making geospatial data analysis and exploration free, open source, and accessible to everyone.

GeoJupyter [TAG] is an open and collaborative community-driven initiative that reimagines geospatial interactive computing experiences for education, research, and industry, and is led by the teams at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science [TAG], the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science & Environment (DSE) [TAG], QuantStack [TAG], 2i2c [TAG] and Development Seed [TAG].

The community enables researchers to confidently engage with geospatial data by combining the collaborative and storytelling power of Jupyter with cutting-edge geospatial tools like JupyterGIS.

In August, over 25 geospatial professionals produced significant technical and strategic breakthroughs at a GeoJupyter hybrid hackathon. Teams built prototypes to automate the development environment setup for JupyterGIS, identified documentation gaps, improved Python integration and data manipulation workflows, and informed strategic planning around JupyterGIS’ mission and vision.

Matt Fisher - Research Software Engineer and Community Manager at DSE reflected: “It was intensely rewarding bringing together people I admire for their technical, strategic and interpersonal expertise. The attendees challenged my assumptions, and I learned so much. Our project is better able to make a real world difference thanks to our community creating the solutions together.”

https://geojupyter.org/blog/20250903-inperson-hackathon-and-design-dialog/

[lillihart]

published posts:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7402129876872302592
https://bsky.app/profile/ucbids.bsky.social/post/3m74nh53ln226

[lillihart]

BIDS in 2025: Cultural Analytics: Data-driven analysis of cultural phenomena

Launched in 2023 and with significant momentum gains in 2025, BIDS [TAG] and the I School [TAG] delivered a series of events with leading scholars who utilize data and AI in their research of literature, music, and socio-technical systems. Large seminars were followed by focused discussions of fundamental questions in cultural analytics at the AI Futures Lab.

Experts from across campus explored the challenges – as well as affordances – wrought by the emergence of powerful deep learning models. These intimate salons nurtured an open dialog and allowed faculty, researchers and graduate students to share unique perspectives and ideas.

Tim Tangherlini [TAG], BIDS Associate Faculty Director, noted that “An important challenge going forward in AI is how we can leverage these technologies to foster understanding across languages, across time and across cultures."

Watch the recording of the first talk in the fall 2025 series: https://bids.berkeley.edu/news/cultural-analytics-inaugural-lecture-%E2%80%9Cuniversality-and-diversity-story-and-song%E2%80%9D-manvir-singh

[KirstieJane]

Beautiful @lillihart - thank you!!

[lillihart]

published posts:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7402855756581998593
https://bsky.app/profile/ucbids.bsky.social/post/3m7bonsaemc26

[lillihart]

BIDS in 2025: CLEAN: Creating tools to increase data transparency and accessibility

Join us in celebrating the CLEAN initiative team and their groundbreaking California Police Records Access Project, a collaboration BIDS and the UC Berkeley School of Journalism [tag], comprised of journalists, data scientists, and lawyers representing eleven project partners [can we tag them?].

The team used AI and machine learning tools to process and organize unstructured police misconduct and use-of-force records. This technological approach was critical in scaling the effort, making it possible to extract and structure data efficiently and accurately from 1.5 million documents from 500 different entities and in various formats.

Aditya Parameswaran [tag], an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences [tag] who led work on the database’s backend, said: “Here we have an amazing example of how generative AI — with humans in the loop — can be used for good, at a scale that’s unprecedented, for a task that’s never been done before and for societal impact.”

Read more about the release of the database: https://journalism.berkeley.edu/berkeley-and-stanford-police-database/

[lillihart]

published posts:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7404327385350987776
https://bsky.app/profile/ucbids.bsky.social/post/3m7bonsaemc26

[lillihart]

BIDS in 2025: AI Futures Lab: Forging a new direction for collaborative innovation

This year, UC Investments and BIDS launched the AI Futures Lab, a hub for groundbreaking research and collaboration at the intersection of AI, science and society. Housed one block from the UC Berkeley [tag] campus, it’s a space — physical, digital and computational — designed to spark collaboration, drive innovation and shape the future.

In the six months following its launch, BIDS hosted Cultural Analytics deep-dive discussions, a GeoJuptyer [tag] hackathon, a JupyterHub leadership summit, and OSPO meetups.

Event plans for 2026 are heating up... To get updates, join the AI Futures Lab announcement list by emailing bids-aifutureslab+subscribe@lists.berkeley.edu!

[KirstieJane]

Beautiful @lillihart!!

Post away!

[lillihart]

published posts:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7404671253351243776
https://bsky.app/profile/ucbids.bsky.social/post/3m7obmlv24s2n

[lillihart]

BIDS in 2025: Valuable resources to advance user design skills

Through meetups and workshops, the Berkeley Open Source Program Office (OSPO) partners with organizations like STRUDEL [tag] and Superbloom [tag] to educate scientific software communities on building USABLE scientific software.

At the OSPO Knowledge Exchange in October, we were joined by three team members from Superbloom for a conversation centered around their view of design as an intervention opportunity to center people and their needs. Eriol Fox [tag] (Senior Designer, Researcher and Product Manager) said "ADD QUOTE".
[note for @KirstieJane : I can't find the recording of the event to grab a quote - argh! Is Eriol a good person to ask for a quote with a quick turnaround?]

Get connected to STRUDEL, Superbloom, and the US-RSE User Experience (UX) Working Group: https://strudel.science/engage/get-involved/