Dear Members and Friends of CITRIS,

The New Year began on a very sad note, as we learned of the death of our colleague and our friend, Richard Newton. As Dean of the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley, Rich was a visionary leader whose belief in technology's ability to alleviate human suffering was a driving force in CITRIS's creation. He was also one of our greatest champions. We joined with our friends in the College of Engineering on February 11 for A Celebration of the Life of Richard Newton, which was both moving and inspiring.

Although we mourn our loss, we also take comfort in knowing that Rich's legacy continues in the important work we are doing here at CITRIS, and in the research and activities he inspired. One such activity is the subject of our first feature. Big Ideas, a UC Berkeley campus initiative started by Tom Kalil, Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and Technology, is providing students with the resources they need to change the world and giving people like you an easy way to donate and help them achieve those goals.

Our second feature looks at an inspiring collaboration between CITRIS's former director Ruzena Bajcsy and Lisa Wymore, an assistant professor in Berkeley's dance department. Wymore is using Bajcsy's tele-immersion lab to explore new possibilities in the realm of dance. At the same time, Bajcsy and her team are learning from the dancers what scientists need to do to improve the technology. Their group, the Resonance Project, calls this pioneering approach "performance as research." We were honored to present their first performance at our holiday party in December.

As always, we thank you for your interest in and support of the work we are doing here at CITRIS. We welcome your comments and ideas.

Professor Shankar Sastry
Director
Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society

CITRIS Awards, Honors, & News

CITRIS Events, Honors, & News

Berkeley selected to lead BP Energy Research Consortium
UC Berkeley has been selected by BP to lead a $500 Million biofuel research effort. UC Berkeley, in partnership with LBNL and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will lead an unprecedented $500 million over ten years research effort to develop new sources of energy and reduce the impact of energy consumption on the environment. The Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) initially will focus its research on biotechnology to produce biofuels — that is, turning plants and plant materials, including corn, field waste, switchgrass and algae, into transportation fuels.
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi.shtml

Steve Kang named new UC Merced chancellor
UC Santa Cruz engineering dean Sung-Mo (Steve) Kang has been appointed chancellor of UC Merced. Kang replaces Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, who stepped down last summer after seven years to return to teaching and scholarship. http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/2007/jan17.html

CITRIS Asia Research Symposium, Taiwan
Our next CITRIS-Asia research symposium will be held on March 27 in Barry Lam Hall at National Taiwan University in Taipei. Faculty members will give technical talks throughout the day, presenting their findings and holding discussion sessions in key areas, such as wireless computing, electronic design automation and digital houses and security. http://www.citris-uc.org/Taiwan-2007

CITRIS professors to draft new California fuel policy
Daniel Sperling (UC Davis), and Alex Farrell (UC Berkeley). Dan Sperling, director of UC Davis' Institute of Transportation Studies, and Alex Farrell, assistant professor in the UC Berkeley Energy and Resources Group are drafting a low-carbon fuel standard for the State of California. The new fuel standard, which will be the first such policy in the world, is part of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s goal to require manufacturers to cut the carbon content of fuels sold in California by at least 10 percent by 2020.
http://www.ucdavis.edu/spotlight/0107/low_carbon_diet.html

ESEM Certificate Program launched at UC Berkeley
UC Berkeley has a new certificate program in Engineering for Sustainability and Environmental Management (ESEM) to train graduate students to work across boundaries to achieve sustainable solutions to pressing societal problems.
http://www.citris-uc.org/esem-feb-2007

Online Marketplace to Support Student Projects
UC Berkeley has launched an online marketplace that allows donors to make a targeted donation to support a specific student project.
http://www.citris-uc.org/big-ideas-dev-2006

<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature1Title" -->Big Plan on Campus<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature1Summary" --> Big Ideas, a CITRIS-supported campus initiative, is giving Berkeley students the resources they need to change the world. Their next donor could easily be you. <!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

by <!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature1Author" -->Jenn Shreve<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

CITRIS students are changing the world—from the refugee camps of Darfur and the Amazonian tribes of Ecuador to the board rooms of Silicon Valley. A new CITRIS-supported initiative at UC Berkeley is making sure they have the resources they need to make a difference on the campus, at home, and abroad.

Called Big Ideas, the new initiative is launching its second annual Bears Breaking Boundaries competition, which awards student groups with the best world-changing proposals. Last year, 29 student-led projects received a total of $100,000 in initial seed funding. An online marketplace allows students to raise additional funds from outside donors.

"The goal of Big Ideas is to help Cal students change the world,” says Tom Kalil, Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and Technology and founder of Big Ideas. “Students are not only identifying projects they would like to work on during the summer, but also designing new courses, certificate programs, and research centers.”

Kalil started Big Ideas in 2005 with an unrestricted grant from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's Omidyar Network. CITRIS was an early supporter of Big Ideas, backing a competition on "IT for society" that was open to all four CITRIS campuses (Berkeley, Davis, Santa Cruz, and Merced).

As Kalil pondered what to do with the grant, he found inspiration in the Berkeley Nanotechnology Club. The 300-member student-led group was organizing an annual conference with 500 attendees and very high-level speakers. The students encouraged the formation of a new high-tech venture that won an Intel-sponsored global business plan competition, and brought together universities and national labs for a Bay Area-wide poster competition.

"I wanted to see whether I could replicate their success by supporting student-led activities in a broad range of areas, such as energy, IT, biotech, health, public policy, and global poverty reduction," Kalil says.

He sought out student projects that "take advantage of the breadth and excellence we have on the campus, that harness our intellectual capital to address some big problem—whether it is on the local, national, or even global level— and that also have the potential to be catalysts for larger research, education, and service activity on campus."

Kalil soon found himself with more good projects than he could fund. That is when he got the idea to set up a Big Ideas Marketplace, a virtual trading floor where students could present their work and solicit donations from alumni, foundations, companies, and other donors. It would serve as a place to recruit, network, get feedback, and create a thriving ecosystem to nurture even more big ideas.

"It is a tremendous resource for us to get connected with potential funders who are interested in these issues," says undergraduate public health major Karis Miyake, who works with the Safe Water for Shuar project.

Led by students in the Cal Undergraduate Public Health Coalition (Cal UPHC), the Shuar project is developing solutions for sustainable water sanitation and better nutrition among tribes in the Pastaza Province of Ecuador. With help from Big Ideas, students have met with the communities and assessed their needs. They have also planned trips to implement their ideas this year.

Shanthi Nataraj, a third year graduate student in Agricultural and Resource Economics, is working on redesigning smokeless stoves from China for the Indian market. She has used Big Ideas to network and research.

"It is a great repository of amazing information. We found out that there is another smokeless stoves project going on in Darfur. So it helps us to network with each other and find out if we can help each other out," says Nataraj.

Both Nataraj and Miyake say they appreciate the opportunity to apply their academic learning to real world problems. Ultimately, Kalil hopes academic learning itself to be impacted, as big ideas are transformed into new courses, centers, and campus initiatives.

For more information:

Omidyar Network

UC Berkeley College of Engineering

CITRIS

UC Berkeley Vice Chancellor for Research

Boalt Hall School of Law

Sevin Rosen Funds

<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature2Title" -->All the lab's a stage<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature2Summary" -->The performance of The Reception at CITRIS's holiday party was more than just great entertainment; it was research. Find out how dancers and scientists are using tele-immersion to advance the state of their art and technology.<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

by <!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature2Author" -->Jenn Shreve<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

Guests at CITRIS's holiday gala in December were treated to a unique and fascinating performance. Mingling in the Heart Memorial Mining Building lobby, they watched on a large projection screen as dancers in labs at UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, came together to interact in a virtual three-dimensional environment.

Behind the scenes of the performance, a veritable ballet of advanced technology was taking place. As dancers moved in the 4-by-4 foot tele-immersion lab at UC Berkeley, 48 cameras arranged in 12 stereo clusters captured their movements from all sides. Twelve computers (one per cluster) then reconstructed the images and sent them via Internet II to yet another computer, where they were combined with images of a single dancer at the University of Illinois, captured using the same method, and rendered in 3D on a virtual stage.

The result? The dancers were able to perform together in semi-real time in spite of being thousands of miles apart. It is this ability for geographically distant people to meet in a third, new environment and interact in the same ways they would face-to-face—whether dancing or simply having a conversation—that differentiates tele-immersion from its predecessors like Virtual Reality.

The event, co-sponsored by Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), was unprecedented not only because it was the first to use tele-immersion technology in a live performance, but because the performance itself was research. It is a model that is being pioneered by the Resonance Project, recently founded by Lisa Wymore with the aim of bringing together scientists and artists to explore the creative, communicative, and technological possibilities of emerging interactive media—tele-immersion in particular.

"It is an amazing reconstruction of real-time images that is not animated in any way. It has a fullness and depth to it that is really striking," says Wymore, an assistant professor in Berkeley's Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Wymore organized the performance and choreographed a subsequent dance piece titled The Reception, which integrated themes from the technology such as multiple viewing points and screen-based representations of the self.

From the early portrayals of dance in film to the current use of motion-capture technology by major choreographers like Merce Cunningham, where technology leads, dance follows. "Dance artists have always been experimenting with how the body can be seen in time and space, how bodies can move in new ways and be seen in new ways," Wymore explains.

Wymore sees tele-immersion as a giant leap forward for her art. The multiple viewing points and three-dimensionality of the technology not only alter how artists like herself view and understand the body, but also open up entire new ways of moving and interacting.

"When you move in the technology, your body can literally dissipate and atomize or fragment. It creates this beautiful effect, almost like Impressionist paintings," Wymore explains, adding that on a virtual stage, bodies can even pass through one another

These results are actually glitches in the still-developing technology, which currently lacks haptic feedback and has difficulty processing fast movements. For Wymore, however, "it is an unexpected outcome that is very beautiful."

For researchers, these same "accidents" provide useful feedback to improve their system. If the CITRIS event gave dance artists like Wymore a chance to experiment with a new way of moving in time and space, for computer science professors Ruzena Bajcsy of Berkeley and Klara Nahrstedt of Illinois, it was a chance to test a technology that incorporates several sub-disciplines and that Bajcsy describes as "at the edge of current capabilities."

"It's not perfect, but with this performance we have shown it can be done," Bajcsy says of tele-immersion. Based on what she and her team learned from the holiday party performance, they have closed the lab for two months to further calibrate their system. They hope, with improvements, the tele-immersion system will be able to acquire and reconstruct more quickly as well as better recognize and process photometrics such as illumination and reflections.

Ultimately, dance performances like the one in December will be just one of many ways tele-immersion is used. Geographically distributed collaboration — whether it is to teach, practice remote medicine, demonstrate products or techniques, or even negotiate in hostage situations — is the ultimate aim of this technology. To that end, Bajcsy and Nahrstedt's teams are focused on paring down the amount of equipment needed from 48 cameras to more practical 6, and from 13 computers to 4.

They are also raising additional funding. The labs at Berkeley and Illinois were built and are operated with a grant from the National Science Foundation, but Bajcsy says more money is needed to advance the state of the art and the technology of tele-immersion.

When the lab reopens in late March, the stage will be set for Act II of the project. On April 22, the Resonance Project will put on another performance (dates and other details below) that Wymore hopes will feature more interaction with the technology, possibly even a duet between two dancers in separate labs. Working in tandem, tele-immersion researchers will be able to see whether their hard work has paid off and to learn more for future iterations of their system.

In this ongoing dance between research and performance, it seems there is always one more step to learn.

Upcoming performances of The Reception:
April 20, 21, 27, 28 at 8pm
April 22*, 29 at 2pm
Zellerbach Playhouse

For more information:

UC Berkeley's Tele-Immersion Lab

Tele-Immersive Environment for EVErbody (TEEVE) project at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

HASTAC

Lisa Wymore

UC Berkeley Department of Dance, Theater & Performance Studies Spring 2007 schedule

Movie of The Reception performance

Photographs of the performance