Berkeley’s Discovery Initiative seeks to implement large-scale, sustainable curricular developments. These changes are aimed at educating skilled practitioners across the hard and human sciences who can answer to our changing world.
The classes below represent some of the most cutting-edge pedagogy on campus. By designing classes that combine student agency, close faculty mentorship, and open-ended problems these courses make pathways toward the overall mission of Discovery.
Physical Systems by and for AI (Physics H190), Eric Ma
Students use AI to conduct inverse design for novel physical systems such as photonics, electronics, acoustics, and quantum devices. In parallel, they learn how physics drives efficient AI hardware. The course culminates in an NSF-style research proposal.
Inorganic Synthesis and Reactions (Chemistry 108), Peidong Yang
Re-envisions an existing laboratory requirement so that students acquire synthesis skills of cutting-edge materials used in the medical & energy fields using real-world examples. Teams of undergrads select original research projects to either build-on current research occurring in the selected area or explore new ideas for material discovery. As a final project they will publish findings in an undergraduate journal.
The Idea of the Museum (Rhetoric 119 / History of Art 192CU), Winnie Wong
This course integrates the relationship between the museum as a concept and the workings of the museum as one among many interlocking, real-world art institutions. Students complete the course by pitching proposals for potential exhibitions to the BAMPFA advisory board, some of which may come to fruition.
Challenge Lab: Building Bridges between Democracy and Technology for a Better Society (Engineering C183F/Political Science C193A, SCET), Gert R Christen
Students build and plan the implementation of a novel product, startup, or policy innovation from scratch. Students work in interdisciplinary teams to address existing problems in the realm of democracy and technology, such as freedom of information, civic empowerment, and data-driven policy. For example, engineering students may leverage technical skills to help translate ideas into products, while political science students may leverage their policy knowledge and social science skills to identify problem areas and generate plausible solutions.
Microbiology Lab (Plant and Microbial Biology C112L), Matthew Traxler
Students test their own hypotheses for bacterial model systems. Pilot funding from the Discovery initiative will be used to purchase automated plate readers that enable experiments to be conducted in high-throughput in a miniature format, radically expanding the number of student experiences.
Artificial Intelligence & Society (Sociology 190), Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya
This course investigates the ethical and social ramifications of AI, especially where it might be found to reproduce the seemingly intransigent inequalities of the century it is quickly consuming. Students will end this course with arguments that are conference ready, and may even find themselves presenting at one with the instructor’s support.
A Collective Ethnography of Digital Platform Work (Sociology 190), David Joseph-Gotneiner
In this course students combine research with self-ethnography (careful narrations of the student’s experiences within a community or work environment) to study the invisible labor of the tech industry: platform labor. This type of work, using all manner of online interfaces that ground new technologies in human labor (for example, the person remotely driving and troubleshooting the Kiwi food delivery bots on campus), makes an invisible and thoroughly modern gig economy that this class seeks to investigate. Students then condense these ethnographies as reports that the companies might use to improve the labor conditions of platform workers.
