By: Sofia Sayyah
We hear the term “big data” all the time. We live in the “era of big data,” companies are learning to “utilize big data,” you can “improve your business model with big data,” yada yada yada. But what is big data? Besides a buzzword, that is.
What is big data?
The phrase “big data” can refer either to the data itself or to the field that undertakes the task of analyzing it. We will discuss what makes data “big” later on, but for now let’s work with the second usage of the term. …
By: Jasmine Wang and Eddie Liu
Social Media in the 21st Century
As one of the world’s fastest-growing phenomena, social media’s impact ranges from simple communication between users to driving modern marketing campaigns to even influencing the ways in which humanity behaves. A significant reason contributing to the rise of social media is the rapid proliferation of internet access globally. Within the global population of 7.7 billion, approximately 3.5 billion people have internet access.
By Smruthi Balajee and Melissa Wong
How it Began
After spending almost seven (!!) months in quarantine, you have all probably experienced that highly dreaded, extremely painful, silently lingering awkwardness that seems to define most of 2020’s virtual interactions. If you haven’t, firstly — we’re jealous, and secondly — fear not, we shall paint you a vivid picture of the feeling. It’s 6:08pm and you are still in bed, almost late for your meeting (even with Berkeley Time)! You quickly hop onto the Zoom call from your phone, scrambling to mute yourself and turn off your camera before you — god forbid —…
By Kyra Wong and Kendall Kikkawa
What is ‘Data Science’?
Data collection, an important aspect of “data science”, is not a new idea. Before the tech boom, every industry already had some sort of data system in place. Think of the government Census, or even medical records. So why is data science only recently becoming such a common career path?
To put it simply, Silicon Valley’s tech boom led to a massive data boom. All of a sudden, tech giants like Google and Facebook saw themselves with unprecedented amounts of data from their users. The next time you make a Google search, look under…
By Trisha Sanghal, Coco Sun, and Sina Ghandian
Background
Over the past few weeks, our team has been researching various police use of force policies and analyzing their relationships with crime rates in American cities. We wanted to build on existing research into how these policies relate to the number of deaths caused by police departments, such as the findings in this document by Campaign Zero. We explored whether or not certain policies are correlated with certain levels of crime. Are cities with greater crime rates more or less likely to implement restrictive use of force policies? Which policies seem to…
By Shreyas Hariharan, Sophie Lou, Varsha Madapoosi
Author’s Note: We were restricted by Medium to embed our interactive Tableau visualizations. However, we have included the links to all Tableau visualizations below each visual that was created using Tableau. Please utilize these links, as you will be able to directly interact with the metadata included in the visualizations and gain a more granular view as the reader. Thank you!
Overview of Small Businesses in the Pandemic
Accounting for 99.9 percent of all U.S. businesses, there are 30.7 million small businesses in the U.S (SBA, 2019). However, small businesses are no doubt one of the most affected sectors during…
By Simrin Bhargava, Bella Yavari, Mark Yang
Author’s Note: We were restricted by Medium to embed our interactive Tableau visualizations. However, we have included the links to all Tableau visualizations below each visual that was created using Tableau. Please utilize these links, as you will be able to directly interact with the metadata included in the visualizations and gain a more granular view as the reader. Thank you!
County Level Analysis
Background
America is no stranger to racial health disparities, but the inequities have come to a head in the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the CDC, racial minorities in the US experience higher rates…
By Sophie Lou and Mark Yang
What is the connection between Data Science and Ethics?
At first glance the two subjects don’t seem to have much in common. Data science is related to engineering and science, while ethics revolves around social science and philosophy. However, the truth is that human contexts and ethics are inseparable parts of Data Science. For the rest of this article we’re going to assume that you already have some basic knowledge about what Data Science is. If you don’t, no worries! Check some other articles by Big Data at Berkeley, or read this article by the UC Berkeley School of Information, which will give…
By Rohil Kanwar
“Tell me something that’s not on your resume.”
I bet we’ve all come across this question in an interview or heard it mentioned in peer’s interview stories. And you think about all that hard work that went into crafting a perfect resume, and yet the recruiter wants to listen to you talk about something not on there. I understand the frustration, but there’s a very interesting reflection to be made about why recruiters continue to ask that question. This is because your resume isn’t supposed to cover everything you’ve ever done! …
How do I pick the right Machine Learning Model? How do I get it to perform well? If these are questions that you’re asking yourself, read on. This article will give you an overview of how to choose and fine-tune your supervised Machine Learning (ML) model.
Some Assumptions About You
I’m going to assume a couple of things about you, reader. Yes — you. Even if these assumptions aren’t valid, I’m sure that this article will still be valuable for you. If they are valid, however, then you’ll get even more out of the content here. …
