Blog

Status of Videoconference AI Bots at Berkeley

June 13, 2024

We have received many questions about the current status of AI technology addons for University video conferences, especially OtterPilot and Zoom AI Companion. These type of AI meeting productivity addons are rapidly evolving; you can find the latest information and recommendations on the Berkeley IT service page for Zoom (which is the University's standard for video...

Berkeley AVC of People and Culture talks AI and Innovation for Staff

Eugene Whitlock, Berkeley's AVC of People & Culture shared his thoughts on the need for innovation and experiments by staff when it comes to AI.

UC San Diego TritonGPT Demo

Join the UC Berkeley AI Community for a presentation from our colleagues from UC San Diego, who will present about TritonGPT, a solution built on an advanced open source large language model (LLM) that is capable of answering a wide range of questions about UC San Diego. We will have a demo and an overview of the technology, as well as hearing about some of the considerations in building this service and use-cases they have chosen to deploy for UCSD.

Governance and Community for AI at Berkeley

December 19, 2023
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.

AI Blog

Welcome to the CTO AI Blog! Here, you can find all of our AI-related content.

Launching the UC Berkeley AI Community and the Berkeley AI Meetup

October 9, 2023
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.

Announcement - Bill Allison Appointed Chief Technology Officer

November 24, 2015
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.

The Berkeley Cloud Strategy

February 2, 2019
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".

Updates and Progress on Cloud Computing at Berkeley

April 5, 2019
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).