Faculty from 10 Colleges Meet at UC Berkeley on Responsible Computing Curricula

A one-day meeting for grant awardees

The gathering took place at the recently opened Gateway building on the Berkeley campus. According to UC Berkeley's Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS), faculty discussed their goals and impact through presentations, guest speakers and panel sessions.

The Mozilla Foundation and Mellon Foundation organized the one-day meeting, which showcased the grant awardees and the curricula they are developing. The projects range from co-training nurses and computer science students on the use of AI in clinical healthcare to scaffolding human-centered design through community-engaged projects.

Examining power in AI

Safinah Ali, assistant professor of educational communication and technology at New York University, discussed a project that designs modules examining power imbalances in AI. "We are preparing students to assess AI's impact by embedding technical learning within structured power analysis and theory," Ali said.

Berkeley's data science approach

Lisa Yan, faculty director of instruction for Berkeley's Data Science Undergraduate Studies program, welcomed attendees and described how human contexts and ethics components have been developed in the Berkeley data science curriculum. Yan and collaborators Ari Edmunson and Cathryn Carson received a 2023 grant from the Responsible Computing Challenge to further develop curricula as part of the program.

The Data Science undergraduate major currently has the most enrolled students at Berkeley. "Data science really is a major that brings together a lot of disciplines and gets students to engage with the computational and inferential as well as the sociopolitical," Yan said.

She explained that the team was able to embed interdisciplinary and human-context work in its senior data science capstone courses and in core foundational upper division courses. "Students don't just get core knowledge from humanists and social scientists, but they also get multiple opportunities throughout the curriculum to apply their technical skills to real problems," Yan said.

What it means for computing education

As faculty and students increasingly consider how computing and AI systems affect and reflect the human experience, Berkeley's data science courses aim to connect core technical training with ethics and responsibility, according to the CDSS report. The meeting brought together instructors from different institutions working on the same question, offering a venue to compare approaches that range from healthcare training to community-based design projects.