UC Berkeley School of Information

Satish Ramachandran is the global head of design at Nutanix, where he is dedicated to applying design to reimagine enterprise computing. In this role he ensures the products being built serve the users’ intent, with very minimal, simple, and delightful interactions. Additionally, he focuses on scaling the design organization across geos and implementing processes to keep pace with rapid growth. Prior to Nutanix, Satish held a variety of management and technical leadership roles over the past two decades at computing infrastructure companies such as DataDomain (EMC), Andiamo (Cisco), and Tandem (HP). A deep background in engineering coupled with a longstanding interest in literature, music, cognition, human behavior, and philosophy enables him to bridge the twin worlds of design and engineering effectively. Satish holds an M.S. in computer science. He lives in Silicon Valley with his family.

Judd Antin delivered the keynote address at the UC Berkeley School of Information's January 2017 commencement ceremony. Judd Antin is the director of research at Airbnb. In his research, Judd uses the methods and practices of UX and data science to study mediated interactions and the connections between attitudes and behaviors. His research draws from UX, HCI, social psychology, communication, behavioral economics, anthropology, and sociology. Judd was previously the manager of the Engagement and Core Experiences research group at Facebook. He earned a Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Information in 2010.

Fast growing startups can launch your career. But breaking into one can sometimes feel like learning a new language. Join Dhawal Mujumdar, MIMS alum 2011 and founder of AdsNative, as he shares insider tips and first-hand experience on making your career in the startup world. Learn how to find interesting startups and evaluate their worth, what roles are most sought after from founders at various stages of the company, how to determine what you bring to the table, and finally - how to connect with startups in a meaningful way, framing your experience to present maximum value and produce positive results. . . . . . . . . Dhawal Mujumdar is a founder of AdsNative, a fast growing startup based out of San Francisco that builds leading monetization software for apps and websites. AdsNative has raised $11 Million in venture financing from leading institutional investors and have offices in San Francisco, New York City, and Bangalore, India. Dhawal has bachelors degree in Computer Science and attended UC Berk

Tech entrepreneurs and policy wonks share a common desire to understand and shape the world, but often have different views, tools, and models for impact. Hear an inside perspective from two former members of President Obama’s White House team about how tech policy and presidential priorities intersect, and how technology will increasingly drive the decision-making process and implementation in the years to come. . . . . . . . . . . . Nicole Wong Former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Nicole Wong is the former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer focusing on internet, privacy, and innovation policy. Prior to joining the Obama administration, Nicole served as the legal director for products at Twitter. From 2004 to 2011, she was Google’s vice president and deputy general counsel, primarily responsible for the company’s product and regulatory matters. Before joining Google, Nicole was a partner at the law firm of Perkins Coie and advised some of Silicon Valley’s early and notable tech companie

Twenty years after the World Wide Web was created, can we now make it better? How can we ensure that our most important values — privacy, free speech, and open access to knowledge — are enshrined in the code itself? In a provocative call to action, entrepreneur and Open Internet advocate Brewster Kahle challenges us to build a better, decentralized Web based on new distributed technologies. He lays out a path to creating a new Web that is reliable, private, but still fun — in order to lock the Web open for good. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A passionate advocate for public Internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: providing universal access to all knowledge. He is the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, one of the largest libraries in the world. Soon after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied artificial intelligence, Kahle helped found the company Thinking Machines, a sup

Will Facebook play a decisive role in the 2016 presidential primaries? Should Twitter be blamed for the rise of the Islamic State? Has the Chinese government successfully marginalized political dissent by controlling the companies that run China’s Internet? The fast-evolving power relationships — and clashes — among governments, corporations, and other non-state actors across digital networks pose fundamental challenges to how we think about governance, accountability, security, and human rights. Without new approaches to governance and accountability by public as well as private actors, the Internet of the future will no longer be compatible with the defense and protection of human rights. Nor will its users — or governments — be any more secure. Fortunately a nascent ecosystem of efforts are now experimenting with new ways to hold governments, companies, and other actors accountable when they exercise power across global networks. One such effort is the Ranking Digital Rights project, which sets forth a fr

Use of new data technologies now pervades our institutions, both private and government. But this data-driven revolution is far from complete. We can still influence where it takes us. I will discuss some of the current challenges we face, both technical and social, and how we might address them. Doug Cutting (@cutting) is the founder of numerous successful open-source projects, including Lucene, Nutch, Avro, and Hadoop. Doug joined Cloudera in 2009 from Yahoo!, where he was a key member of the team that built and deployed a production Hadoop storage and analysis cluster for mission-critical business analytics. Doug holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and sits on the board of the Apache Software Foundation.

Privacy is a critical challenge for mobile application development. Mobile applications are easy to build and distribute, and can collect diverse personal data. US policy approaches to data protection in the mobile ecosystem rely on privacy by design: approaches that encourage developers to proactively implement best-practice privacy features to protect sensitive data. But we don’t know what factors motivate developers to implement privacy features when faced with disincentives such as longer development timelines, markets for personal data, and tensions between data protection and data-enabled services. This project begins to identify these factors by investigating how mobile developers talk about and deal with privacy challenges. Interviews with developers and analysis of posts on developer forums reveal that developers are actively grappling with privacy issues. This talk will describe how developers define and legitimate privacy, and describe how knowledge of how to approach privacy problems is disseminat

Dale Dougherty is the founder and executive chairman of Maker Media, Inc. which launched Make: magazine in 2005, and Maker Faire, which held its first event in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. Dale’s vision and mission continue to be the guiding force for the family of brands. “The maker movement is contributing to a thriving market ecosystem, serving the needs of makers as they seek out product support, startup advice, and funding avenues. Make: plays an important role as a collaborator and resource for makers as they transition from hobbyists to professionals.” As executive chairman, Dale is involved in editorial and content strategy and both business and product development. As part of this process, he forges strategic partnerships in support of maker education and global, cultural, and economic initiatives. Make: began at O’Reilly Media, where Dale was a co-founder and the first editor of their computing trade books. When not in the office, Dale can be found making award-winning wines with his family

Once upon a time, interacting anonymously online meant talking to strangers who could be anywhere in the world and knew very little about you, and about whom you knew very little. Thanks to GPS, ubiquitous mobile devices and an array of recent apps, however, we can now very easily connect anonymously with friends and strangers who are physically nearby. And as anybody who has read reports of (or experienced) cyberbullying or used apps like Grindr/Tinder/Scruff to meet, um, friends can tell you, local anonymity is very different. In this talk I will be reporting on several recent studies of activity on Facebook and Grindr that explore how location-awareness and interacting with local strangers affects the nature of our interactions and self-presentation. Results suggest that people may feel more free to discuss sensitive topics or explore stigmatized identities when anonymous, but that also being local increases their concerns about being recognized by others. Bio: Jeremy Birnholtz is an associate professor

The extent to which we are subject to surveillance — the collection of information about us, by government, commercial, or individual agents — is in large part an economic question. Surveillance takes effort and resources — spend more and we can do better surveillance. Protecting against surveillance also takes effort and resources. Given the state of technology, the amount of effort and money each side expends determines what is surveilled and what is kept private. As technology changes, both the cost and the desirability of surveillance, and protection against surveillance, change. We can confidently predict that information technology and communication costs will continue to decrease, and capabilities to surveil and protect against it will improve. What are the consequences for our privacy? Will we have a future with more or less privacy? Which do we want? Bio: Jeffrey MacKie-Mason will be joining UC Berkeley on October 1 as University Librarian and Chief Digital Scholarship Officer. For the past 29 ye

Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, reflects on the power of information and challenges the I School's 2015 graduates to use that power for good.

In this talk, Hugh Williams shares over ten years of experience in using customer data to improve product experiences and drive business results. He shares stories of both quantitatively and qualitatively understanding customers, and how the large Internet giants experiment, measure, and improve their experiences. He talks about flaws and stories of failed experimentation, and the pitfalls of large scale measurement. He also discusses his career as an executive at Microsoft, eBay, and Pivotal, and talks about what he plans to do next. A significant part of the talk will be interactive, with plenty of time for questions and discussion. This talk was a guest lecture for the course Info 296A. Data Science and Analytics: Thought Leaders. Hugh E. Williams has spent twenty years researching and developing search engines, web services, and big data technologies. From 2009 to 2013, Hugh was with eBay. He led a large cross-disciplinary team that turned-around the Marketplaces business. His teams conceived, designe

“Your data will only be used in aggregated form.” What does this statement mean, and why is it so often included in privacy policies? Drawing from examples in the popular press and the technical literature, the talk will scrutinize the common intuition that privacy is ensured by aggregation and show that information — and hence privacy loss — flows in mysterious ways. Arguing that the situation demands a mathematically rigorous treatment of privacy, the talk will introduce “differential privacy,” a field of research supporting a strong definition of privacy tailored to analysis of large data sets. This still-growing approach is thriving and is beginning to enter practice. Bio: Cynthia Dwork, a distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, is renowned for placing privacy-preserving data analysis on a mathematically rigorous foundation. A cornerstone of this work is differential privacy, a strong privacy guarantee frequently permitting highly accurate data analysis. Dr. Dwork has also made seminal contributi

The data science toolkit encompasses powerful approaches for detecting and clarifying patterns in social or behavioral data. But when it comes to the interpretation of those patterns, it sometimes falls short — the data may convey “what” and “how much” with great precision, but it is often silent on “why” and “how.” Complementary research methods can fill in these gaps and paint a fuller picture of the phenomena at hand. At Facebook, we combine data science with qualitative and quantitative research, often iteratively, to gain a deeper understanding not just of what people are doing on Facebook, but why and how. Judd Antin UX Research Manager Facebook Judd Antin is a UX Research Manager at Facebook, where he focuses on bring the theories and practices of social psychology, social computing, and HCI to bear to improve Facebook’s products. Judd and his team employ methods that range from ethnographic fieldwork to big data analysis to understand products like News Feed, Ads, Photos, and Groups. In 2011, Judd

A rise in chronic conditions has put a strain on our healthcare system. Treatment for chronic conditions spans time, agencies, and providers. Information systems such as electronic health records should be helping with the challenge of coordination, but too often they do not. My research aims to alleviate this problem by designing health information systems that fit social practices and workflow. In this talk I will describe my research agenda around collaborative reflection – an informal, unpredictable, and adaptive type of decision-making. I have studied collaborative reflection in behavioral and mental health services for children, which are coordinated across clinical, home, and special education settings. Through participatory design I developed Lilypad, a tablet-based information system for collaborative reflection. I then examined the social impact of Lilypad using deployment studies. I will discuss what the Lilypad project tells us about the way health information systems should be designed and integr

In his doctoral dissertation, Kai Huotari studied how TV live-tweeting influenced the TV viewing experience. He interviewed 45 live-tweeters and analyzed more than 4,000 TV live-tweets sent in the U.S. in 2011–12. The study identified four distinct groups of users live-tweeting about TV programs (fanatic TV live-tweeters, systematic TV live-tweeters, sporadic TV live-tweeters, and active Twitter users), four main categories of TV live-tweets (courtesy tweets, outlet tweets, selection tweets, and analysis tweets), described several TV live-tweeting practices from preparation practices to reading and writing live-tweets and to the use of Twitter functions, and revealed that a TV live-tweeter is an empowered TV viewer who can, by experientializing live-tweeting into his or her TV viewing, personalize and control his or her TV-viewing experience better than before, express him- or herself more fully, and reach a large enough audience and acceptance for his or her ideas.

Jake Peterson discusses the Facebook analytics team and how they perform large scale data analysis, identify actionable insights, suggest recommendations, and influence the direction of the business. The Facebook analytics team serves as the voice of data that drives success throughout the company, including product development, user engagement, growth, revenue, and operations. Learn about their typical day-to-day responsibilities, challenges, and how best to succeed as a data scientist in analytics. Jake Peterson is a data scientist and analytics engineering manager at Facebook and has been working in data science for more than ten years — longer than “data science” has been a term. At Facebook, Jake has led data science for four different Facebook product teams, most recently for the Graph Search product. Prior to Facebook, Jake led analytics functions at several tech startups and spent six years in the direct marketing industry as an analytics consultant at Acxiom. He holds a B.S. in computer science and

What does the recent battle for patent reform mean for startups and for the future of tech policy? Julie Samuels is executive director and president of the board of Engine, a young and influential advocacy group working to ensure startups have a voice in D.C. Through policy analysis, economic research, and close relationships with policymakers and startups, Engine is helping to elevate the interests of technology entrepreneurship in American policy. Julie gives an overview of the recent battle in Washington for patent reform and talk about lessons learned. She discusses what the battle means for technology and startup policy going forward — and explains why startups and businesses need to stay involved in the fight for change in D.C.

Meet Eric Liu and Paul Duan of Bayes Impact, a non-profit organization deploying data science teams to work with civic and nonprofit organizations to solve big social impact challenges. They’ll talk about how Bayes Impact’s full-time fellowship programs bring together domain experts and data scientists from top technology companies and academic institutions and how I School students can get involved.