The Berkeley data science division, which was launched in July 2019, has just announced its new name: the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society. The name reflects the division's broad, cross-disciplinary approach to education, and encompasses the School of Information, BIDS, the Data Science Education Program, and the Data Science Commons, as well as involvement with the departments of Statistics and EECS. The announcement follows the arrival of the new Associate Provost for the Division, Jennifer Chayes, who took the reins in January.
Jennifer Chayes is Associate Provost of the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society, and Dean of the School of Information. She is Professor of EECS, Mathematics, Statistics, and the School of Information. Before joining Berkeley, she was at Microsoft for over 20 years, where she was Technical Fellow, and founder and managing director of three interdisciplinary labs: Microsoft Research New England, New York City, and Montreal. Chayes has received numerous awards for both leadership and scientific contributions, including the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Leadership Award, the John von Neumann Award of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and an honorary doctorate from Leiden University. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.
Chayes’ research areas include phase transitions in computer science, and structural and dynamical properties of networks including modeling and graph algorithms. Chayes is one of the inventors of the field of graphons, which are widely used for the machine learning of large-scale networks. Her recent work focuses on machine learning, including both theory and applications in cancer immunotherapy, ethical decision making, and climate change.