Featured Researchers
Dr. David Bamman, Associate Professor in UC Berkeley’s School of Information
“If we didn’t have the SRDC at Berkeley, support from the Mellon Foundation and legal expertise in the Library and Samuelson Clinic, we couldn’t have carried out this study.”
The research was conducted by a team at UC Berkeley, led by David Bamman (Associate Professor in the School of Information) and researchers from the Berkeley NLP Group and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS). The team used AI-powered computer vision and facial recognition technology to automate the analysis of more than 2,300 Hollywood films from 1980 to 2022 to verify perceptions of increasing diversity in cinema.
The Secure Research Data and Compute (SRDC) platform is critical to this work because of the legal and technical complexity of analyzing copyrighted films by providing a controlled, secure environment and computational power necessary to run intense computer vision algorithms.
From news.berkeley.edu
Ellen Bruno, Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics
My work evaluates the potential for and effectiveness of different policies for managing water resources. https://are.berkeley.edu/people/ellen-bruno
Research IT was instrumental in helping me and my research team understand best practices for data management. Their support enabled me to navigate complex data sharing agreements with different public and private agencies which is making my research possible. 
Dr. Lazar Supic, a postdoctoral scholar from the DeepDrive Lab
“[I] was thus enabled to take advantage of free Faculty Computing Allowance (FCA) on Savio [...] Nicolas helped me get it working, and I really appreciated his support,” he says. “That Berkeley Research Computing was willing and able to work with me to achieve a research goal was very helpful.”
The Berkeley DeepDrive (BDD) Industry Consortium is an interdisciplinary research group focused on "deep automotive perception." Their primary goal is to enable self-driving cars to "see" and make real-time decisions—such as braking or steering—in less than one-tenth of a second.
Research IT provides BDD with the infrastructure and expertise necessary to handle the project's big data and intensive computational needs. This has helped both cost management and the ability to scale up the research capacity.
Victoria Huynh, Department of Ethnic Studies
Victoria is a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies who works at the intersections of critical refugee studies, abolitionist thought, U.S. militarism in Southeast Asia, and the politics of displacement.
Research IT worked closely with me over months to develop necessary tools for me to conduct sensitive research with vulnerable communities impacted by incarceration and deportation. Because of the Research IT team and the SRDC platform, I can guarantee a rigorous level of confidentiality and protection to those who have generously offered to share their life histories with me. This has streamlined my research process and given me access to sensitive data which has been vital to my dissertation.
Rebecca Goldstein, Assistant Professor of Law
“I've loved working with the staff at SRDC since they're clearly so committed to helping get my research off the ground. There is no way that without SRDC I'd have been able to access and easily analyze a highly sensitive government data set that's crucial to my research, and I hope this data analysis will become part of a major article or book in the future. They have also made it easy for me to work collaboratively on sensitive data with postdocs and graduate students, which has made my work go much faster and more smoothly than it otherwise would have. I'm so grateful Berkeley provides this resource to faculty!”
Dr. Goldstein works at the intersection of racial and ethnic politics and bureaucratic politics involves analyzing how different groups interact with the state. This includes large-scale quantitative studies of criminal justice outcomes.
The SRDC platform allows her to access and analyze the sensitive government data necessary for her research as well as work collaboratively with postdocs and graduate students on sensitive datasets in a secure, air-gapped environment, which significantly speeds up the research process.