UC Berkeley

Both the Banatao Institute @ CITRIS Berkeley (the UCB component of the four-campus institute) and CITRIS Headquarters are on the northeast corner of the Berkeley campus in Sutardja Dai Hall.

This state-of-the-art, 140,000-square-foot building opened in 2009 and is a crossroads for faculty and students from fields that otherwise rarely intersect. Representatives from the schools of Public Health, Information Science, Business, Public Policy, Law, and Performing Arts, as well as computer scientists, bioengineers, and mechanical engineers meet and work together in this building’s labs, classrooms, and auditoriums to address some of the world’s biggest challenges. Investigators from bioengineering and the School of Public Health, for example, work with doctors from the University of California at San Francisco on the development of a cell-phone-based microscope (CellScope) that can help lightly trained medical workers diagnose malaria, sickle cell, and other diseases in remote parts of the world. Business School students collaborated with the CellScope team to develop a business plan and marketing strategies for the device. Faculty from the Berkeley School of Public Health are collaborating with engineers to apply pervasive computing and sensor technology to the personal monitoring of high-risk patients to help them combat diabetes, obesity, and other health problems. Investigators from the schools of Information and Law worked together with the School of Public Policy to evaluate the ethics and efficacy of San Francisco’s Community (crime prevention) Camera Program, culminating in a major report.

One wing of Sutardja Dai Hall contains CITRIS’s Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory, a world-class lab that serves CITRIS investigators from many disciplines and their students, as well as industry members and the wider research community. The Marvell Lab gives CITRIS investigators a place to make the photonics devices, smart dust, and other small MEMS/NEMS sensors that drive the institute’s IT approach to many of California’s societal-scale challenges. The Banatao Institute@CITRIS continues to explore new territory on the frontiers of wireless sensor networks, energy harvesting, and tiny communicating sensor devices of all kinds, and to “shorten the pipeline” between academic research and real-world applications, such as the smart electrical meters that have become a signature of California’s approach to energy conservation. Berkeley’s i4Energy Institute coordinates the many CITRIS-related labs and institutes that focus on energy efficiency. Like the three other CITRIS campuses, the Banatao Institute uses its access to campus buildings and systems as testbeds for the technologies emerging throughout CITRIS. Industry partners work shoulder-to-shoulder with Berkeley investigators in the new labs, where they have access to top minds in engineering and other sciences, but also access to experts on law, government regulation, and the social impacts of new technology. Sutardja Dai Hall also hosts the Berkeley Center for New Media and the CITRIS Tech Museum, both reflections of the CITRIS commitment to exploring the frontiers of IT and new forms of communication.