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This post outlines how I am thinking about how governance and community work together to support a Berkeley AI strategy, aligned with the University of California’s AI Guiding Principles. I’m making the case for a first layer of foundational governance needed to get the ball rolling— establishing basic contracts, security and data reviews, baseline risk assessments— and then getting the tools into peoples’ hands to learn and experiment. We created the UC Berkeley AI Community to leverage the strength of our diverse population and perspectives, to tap the community to accelerate the development and exchange of ideas and information towards building a more sophisticated institutional understanding of AI. Community engagement speeds the path to effective functional governance; ie, having the right existing decision-making bodies and roles making intentional choices about where and when Berkeley uses and does not use AI.

Artificial intelligence is just beginning to come of age. The latest wave of new AI capabilities has transformed what's possible in meaningful ways, reminiscent of the rise of the internet or the inception of public cloud and mobile computing. These technological advances along with an acceleration of new capabilities will deeply impact core functions of teaching, learning, research and administration at all universities. Advances are occurring across many domains of AI-- and the UC Berkeley AI Community encompasses this wider interpretation-- from machine learning, natural language processing, robotics, including generative AI and also inquiry into AI ethics, explainable AI and knowledge representation.

Through the Berkeley Changemakers Innovation Grant, Dr. Pablo Gonzalez and his team have created a fully functioning podcast studio for students, faculty, and staff to utilize. The purpose of this studio is to give the UC Berkeley community a platform to amplify their voices. The CTO interns were lucky enough to get the opportunity to record at the studio and further understand what this studio means to the university community but also how to get more students, faculty, and staff involved.

Last month a group of inspiring and diverse group of teams celebrated their groundbreaking innovations at the Fall Technology Innovation Forum. The theme of the innovation forum was “Innovation in the Time of Coronavirus.” Given this year’s tumultuous events, the forum was designed to convene people from across campus who are designing new ways of doing things so they could connect virtually and share their experiences developing teaching and environmental applications to combat the impact of Coronavirus.

Back in February, we began to put out the call for innovation proposals from all over campus, asking them to share their alignment with the Chancellor's top strategic priorities and also to address what the University needs NOW. For a top research University, no matter what hard times we're having, innovation isn't just a "nice to have" - it's an essential ingredient to maintaining our excellence and scaling access & equity for a Berkeley education. Many proposals we received tackle Berkeley's response to remote learning beyond Zoom during COVID-19.

Submissions have closed, and the review committee is evaluating this year's applicants to the Berkeley Changemaker Technology Innovation Grant program. The grant program supports proof of value experiments that enhance the University's operations, bolster its research endeavors, and help transform instruction and the classroom experience. As advisor Jean Cheng puts it, "At a time when the campus is looking for solutions to new and urgent problems, the CTO grant program is an exciting opportunity to make strategic contributions to projects that are likely to have a significant impact. We were thrilled to see compelling proposals from diverse groups and corners of campus."

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. The innovation project you propose should involve some combination of people, process, technology and information and support one or more of UC Berkeley's three key campus strategies:

The UC Berkeley Cloud Community of Practice will be hosting the 11th UC Berkeley Cloud Computing Meetup at the Berkeley SkyDeck Penthouse on Tuesday, February 25 with doors opening at 4:30 pm. We have some excellent guests and topics and hope to see you there. Everyone is welcome - this is a really inclusive group! You don't have to be an expert, or already know about cloud technologies; we get together so people can learn from each other. The Berkeley SkyDeck is at 2150 Shattuck, on the top floor (press "PH" in the elevator.) There will be soft drinks, salad, and pizza from Sliver.

We want to get the word out on a truly unique experience just for UC Berkeley students, brought to you in partnership with the Academic Innovation Studio, the Creative Lab, and the Student Technology Fund! This is an inclusive event, and all experience levels are welcome, from experts to people who’ve never worked with Adobe tools before. We want you there! Here's the description and sign-up link from Adobe:

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. Several of us involved in launching the original report collaborated on an article, posted today on the University's main technology website, Looking Back: Celebrating Five Years of Data Privacy and Transparency at UC Berkeley, that reflects back on the launch and where we are today.

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. As the first chapter of the open source book for Data 8 (one of the courses) puts it:

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. Anthony Suen has been instrumental in forging a partnership with IST, and the greater OneIT community -- for example, this Kubernetes training he and Eric Fraser organized. (The photo below is the cohort that completed the training).

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.