We are now accepting proposals for Berkeley’s first-ever CTO Technology Innovation program. The CTO is looking to support proposals that will enhance the University’s operations, bolster its research endeavors or help transform instruction and the classroom experience.

January 28th brings another Data Protection Day. Five years ago today we launched UC Berkeley’s “bConnected Transparency Report” to give our students, faculty, and staff a clear idea about how the University handles their personal information in services like Google, Box, and Sharepoint.

We live in a world awash in data. As individuals and as a society we need to learn how to better understand, analyze, and use it. To that end, Berkeley recently started an exciting initiative to teach every undergraduate the fundamentals of data science.

The most salient recent developments have been in focusing our work to align with the Chancellor’s strategy – in the case of cloud computing, especially towards support for scaling up Jupyterhub to meet the needs of the Division of Data Sciences.

I wanted to share a brief overview of UC Berkeley’s Cloud Strategy so that anyone can get a sense of it in a few minutes. The most important takeaway is that it directs our focus always to be ‘University First’. As a campus, we must invest in technology that meets the needs of the campus mission for our faculty, students, and administration – rather than focusing on technology first or ‘Cloud First’.

We are pleased to announce that William Allison has been appointed Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the University of California at Berkeley, effective today, November 24, 2015. Reporting to Deputy CIO Lyle Nevels with a dotted line to CIO Larry Conrad for campus-wide initiatives, Bill is responsible for the leadership of Berkeley’s IT architecture and consideration of emerging technologies in support of research, teaching, and administration. Bill will facilitate the governance and oversight of IT architecture activities University-wide, guiding the development and implementation of a shared vision and architectural standards that support and enable the University’s strategic goals.