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.

Art Of The Start: Launch Your Startup Career (Dhawal Mujumdar)

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 Berkeley for his master's degree from School of Information. Dhawal also worked as a visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley.

Pace of Change: Silicon Valley and the West Wing (Nicole Wong & Greg Nelson)

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 companies, including Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Netscape. She also has taught media and internet law and policy courses as an adjunct professor and lecturer at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and University of San Francisco. Nicole is a frequent speaker and author on issues related to law and technology, including five appearances before the US Congress regarding internet policy. She is a founding columnist for the Christian Science Monitor’s Passcode, a section covering online security and privacy in the digital age. She serves as an advisor to the UC Berkeley School of Information, the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative, and several technology companies on privacy, regulatory strategy and international development. Nicole chairs the board of Friends of Global Voices, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting citizen and online media projects globally, and sits on the board of WITNESS, an organization promoting the use of video to advance human rights. Nicole received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Georgetown University, and a law degree and a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley. . . . . . . . . . . . Greg Nelson Former Chief of Staff, Special Assistant to the President, and Senior Advisor, National Economic Council, The White House Greg Nelson left the White House this summer after six and a half years as a senior leader in the economic policy, technology, and strategic partnerships teams. During his tenure, his policy portfolio included international trade, economic policy, and US participation in the G7 and G20, infrastructure, technology policy, energy, entrepreneurship, and startups. For two years, Greg was the chief of staff at the National Economic Council for director Gene Sperling, where he coordinated economic policy development, managed strategy and communications, and worked across the White House and cabinet to develop and implement the president’s economic policy priorities. Previously, Greg was deputy director of the White House Office of Public Engagement focused on public-private partnerships and setting up the White House’s private sector engagement infrastructure, including as deputy director of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Prior to the White House, Greg built and sold a technology company, developed startups in energy and biomaterials, and consulted for businesses, nonprofits, and foundations. He holds a BA in political science and history from Yale University.

Locking the Web Open: A Call for a New, Distributed Web (Brewster Kahle)

Power, Accountability, and Human Rights in a Networked World (Rebecca MacKinnon)

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 framework for measuring information and communication technology (ICT) companies’ commitments, policies, and practices affecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy. In this lecture, Ranking Digital Rights director Rebecca MacKinnon discusses the project’s Corporate Accountability Index as a concrete example how stakeholders around the globe are working to create new frameworks, mechanisms, and processes for holding power accountable and promoting the protection of human rights in a digitally networked world. . . . . . . . Rebecca MacKinnon is a leading advocate for Internet users’ rights to online freedom of expression and privacy around the world. She is author of the award-winning book Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom (Basic Books, 2012). Presently based at New America in Washington, D.C., she directs the Ranking Digital Rights project whose Corporate Accountability Index ranks the world’s most powerful Internet and telecommunications companies on policies and practices affecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy. MacKinnon is co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices, a borderless community of more than 800 writers, digital media experts, activists, and translators living around the world who give voice to the stories of marginalized and misrepresented communities and who advocate for the free expression rights of Internet users everywhere. She also serves on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists and is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder organization focused on upholding principles of freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon was CNN’s Beijing bureau chief from 1998 to 2001 and Tokyo bureau chief from 2001 to 2003. Since leaving CNN in 2004 she has held fellowships at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press and Public Policy, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Open Society Foundations, and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. For two years in 2007–08 she served on the faculty of the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, and taught as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Fall 2013. She is also a visiting affiliate at the Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Global Communications Studies. MacKinnon received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard University and was a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan. She presently lives in Washington, D.C.

Challenges for the Data Ecosystem (Doug Cutting, Chief Architect, Cloudera)

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.

“I'm Very Concerned About the Privacy of My Users:” Privacy as a Practice in Mobile App Development (Katie Shilton, University of Maryland)

Communications, Community, and Celebration: Co-creating the Maker Movement (Dale Dougherty)

Remember When Nobody Knew You Were a Dog? Anonymity, Identity and Location in Online Social Environments (Jeremy Birnholtz)

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 in the departments of communication studies and electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University. He recently served as a visiting professor on the core data science team at Facebook. His research aims to improve the usefulness and usability of communication and collaboration tools, via a focus on understanding and exploiting mechanisms of human attention and identity management. Jeremy's work has been published in the ACM CHI, CSCW and Group Proceedings, as well as in Organization Science, HCI, JASIST, JCMC, and Computers in Human Behavior. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Google, Facebook and the US Department of Agriculture.

Can We Afford Privacy from Surveillance? Do We Want To? (Jeffrey MacKie-Mason)

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 years, Jeff has been a faculty member at the University of Michigan, where he was the Arthur W. Burks Collegiate Professor of Information and Computer Science, and also a professor of economics and a professor of public policy. For the last five years he has been the dean of Michigan’s School of Information. Jeff has been a pioneering scholar of the economics of the Internet and online behavior and a frequent co-author with the Berkeley I School’s first dean, Hal Varian. He has also led the development of the incentive-centered design approach to online information services.

Graduation 2015: Ph.D. student speeches (Bob Bell & Stuart Geiger)

Bob Bell & Stuart Geiger (Ph.D. 2015) look back on their years of doctoral study and what they've learned.

Graduation 2015: MIDS student speech (Sharon X. Lin)