Ken Goldberg Receives Faculty Award for Research in the Public Interest
Berkeley's annual and prestiguous Awards of Public Service were awarded by Chancellor Carol Christ on May 1st.
Ken Goldberg was announced as the winner of the award recognizing faculty research in public interest. The website praises his work and reads:
Goldberg, a professor of industrial engineering and operations at the College of Engineering, and a team of postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate students have spent the last four years developing the Collaborative Assessment and Feedback Engine (CAFE), an open source, e-participation platform that provides participants with dynamic visual feedback about their position on key social issues, applies statistical models and collaborative filtering to rapidly discover emerging trends as data is collected, and presents emerging insights back to participants and decision-makers in near real time.
The team has successfully implemented CAFE to address a variety of social issues, from the effectiveness of family planning measures in Uganda to the political context of midterm elections in Mexico. Altogether, the platform has gathered feedback from over 25,000 participants across four countries. By fostering open-ended dialogue and facilitating a more nuanced assessment of public opinion about complex issues, CAFE enables more informed organizational decisions while increasing participant engagement in decision-making processes.
This research was sponsored by the CITRIS Connected Communities Initiative. Brandie Nonnecke has served as the project director for the implementations in Uganda (funded by USAID), Mexico (funded by CITRIS), and elsewhere. Camille Crittenden, Deputy Director of CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, received the award on Ken's behalf.
See the complete list of award winners here.