DS421 Data Science for the 21st Century Program Wrap Up!

Today we had our 1st Data Science for the 21st Century Program Conference. Some cool things that I learned: 

• Cathryn Carson updated us on the status of the Data Science program on campus - we are teaching 1200 freshman data science right now. Amazing. And a new Dean is coming. 
• Phil Stark on the danger of being at the bleeding edge of computation - if you put all your computational power into your model, you have nothing left to evaluate uncertainty in your model. Let science guide data science. 
• David Ackerly believes in social networking! 
• Cheryl Schwab gave us an summary of her evaluation work. The program outcomes that we are looking for in the program are: Concepts, communication, interdisciplinary research
• Trevor Houser from the Rhodian Group http://rhg.com/people/trevor-houser gave a very interesting and slightly optimistic view of climate change. 
• Break out groups, led by faculty: 
  • (Boettiger) Data Science Grand Challenges: inference vs prediction; dealing with assumptions; quantifying uncertainty; reproducibility, communication, and collaboration; keeping science in data science; and keeping scientists in data science. 
  • (Hsiang) Civilization collapses through history: 
  • (Ackerly) Discussion on climate change and land use. 50% of the earth are either crops or rangelands; and there is a fundamental tradeoff between land for food and wildlands. How do we deal with the externalities of our love of open space (e.g. forcing housing into the central valley). 
• Finally, we wrapped up with presentations from our wonderful 1st cohort of DS421 students and their mini-graduation ceremony. 
• Plus WHAT A GREAT DAY! Berkeley was splendid today in the sun. 

Plus plus, Carl B shared Drew Conway's DS fig, which I understand is making the DS rounds: 

From: http://drewconway.com/zia/2013/3/26/the-data-science-venn-diagram