This November, founding faculty member, Jodi Halpern, and Executive Director, Lea Witkowsky, traveled to Berlin, Germany to participate in the annual Falling Walls Science Summit. The UC Berkeley Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public was featured with Jodi Halpern in a panel on day two of the summit titled, "Integrating Ethics and Public Engagement into Scientific Discovery". Organized and supported by the Kavli Foundation, this session discussed how to break the walls of academic silos and barriers between science and public as well as the ways to engage the public proactively...
At this meeting, Philip Reiner will share important findings from a two-year project of the Digital Cognition and Democracy Initiative which brought together experts in neuroscience, AI, digital media, psychiatry, government, and more to investigate how digital technologies influence cognition and democracy. You can...
The Kavli Center's Jodi Halpern is among this year's John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellows. The prestigious awards recognize scholars with impressive achievements in fields ranging from the natural sciences to the creative arts. Guggenheim fellowship winners receive one-time grants of varying amounts that allow recipients the time and creative freedom to complete their research, books or other projects.
“I am deeply grateful to Guggenheim for encouraging my current book project Remaking the Self in the Wake of Illness, which is about finding sources of emotional security...
In January, [Kavli Center Steering Committee member] Jodi Halpern, MD, PhD, traveled to Santiago, Chile to give a keynote address to the Congreso Futuro, a preeminent South American science communication event, titled “The Power of Empathic Curiosity in a Divided World.” The talk was on the concept of empathic curiosity, which Prof. Halpern describes as a “cognitive pathway…that is resilient during conflict” and calls upon people—particularly those in conflict when “sympathy and compassion evaporate”—to bridge divides by...
In recent years, AI-based mental health care startups like Youper and Woebot Health, also headquartered in San Francisco, have raised millions of dollars in funding. About 22% of adults have used a mental health chatbot, according to a 2021 survey commissioned by Woebot Health, and 47% of respondents said they would be interested in using the technology.
According to studies affiliated with Woebot Health, users can establish a bond with bot within three to five days, and young adults users saw a 22% reduction in depression symptoms in two weeks time.
A new paper in the journal Ethics and Human Research is co-authored by Berkeley Public Health Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities Jodi Halpern.