Dear Members and Friends of CITRIS,

We are very pleased to announce the appointment of Prof. S. Shankar Sastry as the new Director of CITRIS. This position, formerly held by the founding CITRIS director, Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy, is one of distinction, excitement, and challenge. As leader of this Institute, Prof. Sastry will bring his own vision, energy, and leadership skills to shape and guide CITRIS. On behalf of all CITRIS constituents and partners, we welcome Prof. Sastry to this position and look forward to his influence, guidance, and impact. We know that Prof. Sastry will welcome the continued support of all those involved in CITRIS.

Following Prof. Sastry’s biographical sketch is an interview article in which he expands upon his vision and plans for CITRIS. Please join us in welcoming Prof. Sastry to this new role.

Biographical Sketch

S. Shankar Sastry became Chair, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley in January, 2001, and held that position until 2004. Prior to that, he served as Director of the Information Technology Office at DARPA. From 1996–1999, he was the Director of the Electronics Research Laboratory at Berkeley, an organized research unit on the Berkeley campus conducting research in computer sciences and all aspects of electrical engineering. During his directorship from 1996–1999, extra-mural funding of the laboratory grew from $29M to $50M. Prof. Sastry also holds a joint professorship in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and Bioengineering.

Prof. Sastry received his Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was on the faculty of MIT as assistant professor from 1980–1982 and at Harvard University as a chaired Gordon Mc Kay professor in 1994. He has held visiting appointments at the Australian National University in Canberra, the University of Rome, Scuola Normale, and the University of Pisa, the CNRS laboratory LAAS in Toulouse (poste rouge), Professor Invite at Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (CNRS laboratory VERIMAG), and a Vinton Hayes Visiting fellow at the Center for Intelligent Control Systems at MIT. His areas of research are embedded and autonomous software, computer vision, and computation in novel substrates such as DNA, nonlinear and adaptive control, robotic telesurgery, control of hybrid systems, embedded systems, sensor networks and biological motor control.

Nonlinear Systems: Analysis, Stability and Control is Prof. Sastry’s latest book, published by Springer-Verlag in 1999. He has coauthored over 250 technical papers and six books, including Adaptive Control: Stability, Convergence and Robustness (with M. Bodson, Prentice Hall, 1989) and A Mathematical Introduction to Robotic Manipulation (with R. Murray and Z. Li, CRC Press, 1994). He co-edited Hybrid Control II, Hybrid Control IV and Hybrid Control V (with P. Antsaklis, A. Nerode, and W. Kohn, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1995, 1997, and 1999, respectively), Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (with T.Henzinger, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1998), and Essays in Mathematical Robotics (with Baillieul and Sussmann, Springer-Verlag IMA Series). Books on embedded software and structure from motion in computer vision are in progress.

Prof. Sastry served as associate editor for numerous publications, including: IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control; IEEE Control Magazine; IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems; the Journal of Mathematical Systems, Estimation and Control; IMA Journal of Control and Information; the International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing; and the Journal of Biomimetic Systems and Materials.

Prof. Sastry was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 “for pioneering contributions to the design of hybrid and embedded systems.” He also received the President of India Gold Medal in 1977, the IBM Faculty Development Award for 1983–1985, the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985, the Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council in 1990, an M.A. (honoris causa) from Harvard in 1994, Fellow of the IEEE in 1994, the distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology in 1999, and the David Marr prize for the best paper at the International Conference in Computer Vision in 1999.

He has supervised more than 45 doctoral students to completion and over 50 M.S. students. His students now occupy leadership roles in several locations, such as dean of engineering at Caltech, director of Information Systems Laboratory, Stanford, Army Research Office, and on the faculties of every major university in the United States.

<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature1Title" -->Meet the new director<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature1Summary" -->As CITRIS’s new director, S. Shankar Sastry has set his sights on an ambitious plan to tackle some of society’s biggest challenges over the next three years. <!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

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

S. Shankar Sastry first came to UC Berkeley as a graduate student in Electric Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) in the late 1970s. Since then he’s become one of the College of Engineering’s most distinguished professors and researchers. Awarded the Nippon Electronics Corporation Distinguished Professorship in the College of Engineering and the Walter A. Haas School of Business, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 “for pioneering contributions to the design of hybrid and embedded systems” and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. In addition, he’s served as director of the Information Technology Office of DARPA, director of the Electronics Research Laboratory at Berkeley, and most recently chair of the very department where he earned his Ph.D.

As CITRIS’s newly director, Sastry has an ambitious agenda for the center’s next three years. His priorities include using information communications technology to advance heath care, improving search technologies as well as the security of societal-scale systems, and developing a better understanding of why certain technologies make it in the marketplace and others fail. He also plans to reach out to undergraduates. We recently spoke with Sastry about CITRIS’s accomplishments and what’s next.

What, in your opinion, have been CITRIS’ biggest successes since its inception in 2001?

CITRIS was started with the goal of marrying tech push, a traditional activity of universities, with application pull, and the applications were to be grand challenge societal problems. The major accomplishment is that we’ve actually created an ecosystem in which this is possible. In this “demilitarized zone,” our corporate partners, a broad spectrum of universities, and major stakeholders in societal scale infrastructures have collaborated without being obstructed by barriers like intellectual property protection. Already we have launched a number of successful projects, ICT4B and the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative to name just two. Another measure of success are the number of centers that have been created through CITRIS. So this is only going to grow.

Can you describe your vision for CITRIS during your three-year term?

"CITRIS is a clear statement that what matters in information technology is not just the technology but its applications, how it is going to help people. This has always been the vision of CITRIS and I am convinced Shankar will drive this vision forward with great energy. Shankar brings a wealth of experience with large multi-partner programs. I welcome his appointment as director."
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Patrick Scaglia, Chair of the CITRIS Industrial Advisory Board and V.P. & Director of the Internet and Computing Platforms Research Center at HP Labs.

CITRIS has already done a great job of addressing a wide number of societal-scale challenges and systems. But there are some really big items that CITRIS hasn’t dealt with yet. The first one I want to focus on is the use of new information communication technologies for better delivery of health care at a lower price. Consider, for example, the use of wireless devices for continuously monitoring populations that suffer from chronic disease or monitoring the elder population. I plan to do this in partnership with The California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research, QB3.

A second area involves new search technologies. We’ve really got to go beyond Google to being able to search in three dimensions—not just text content but multimedia, audio, and video. Then you’ve got to be able to search for content on a semantic basis, not knowing exactly where the data is. And you have to create these new search capabilities with the viewpoint of protecting privacy and providing strong security, something we will do in strong collaboration with Pam Samuelson, from the Boalt School of Law and the Cyber Law Clinic.

That leads me into a third area, secure systems. We have to make high-confidence, trusted systems, trusted software that degrades gracefully under hacker attack.

The fourth area is what is being billed as services science, the study of why some technologies make it in marketplace and others, often the best, don’t. If you want to introduce a new technology, you have to understand a model that includes the aspects of the social environment where this new technology will change people’s lives. This is going to require a very substantial engagement with the Haas business school and SIMS, the School for Information Management and Systems.

Finally, CITRIS has been a tremendous vehicle for research, but it needs to enter the academic mainstream. Specifically, a lot of students on our CITRIS campuses get a four-year undergraduate degree without a capstone experience in which they deal with complex systems. I’d like for CITRIS to provide projects to help pay for that fifth year.

What are the biggest challenges you will be facing as director?

The founding corporate members signed up for an initial four-year time period and the initial agreement with the State was for the first four years. Well, we’ll soon be entering our fourth year. I’d like to provide them, as well as many of our newer partners, with new set of challenges in the areas I just suggested.

CITRIS is multidisciplinary, but its primary focus has been engineering. How will you foster stronger relationships with researchers from other disciplines?

All of the new initiatives I’ve talked about are multidisciplinary. I don’t foresee too many problems getting social scientists, lawyers, physicians, and others involved in this.

How has CITRIS evolved since it began?

CITRIS began with information technology, but now we are harvesting a lot of wonderful new technologies, some nanotechnology, some biotechnology. The information technology of yesterday will become a wonderful fusion of the best of nano and the best of bio technologies integrated with a core of information communication technologies. From that wellspring will emerge new and revolutionary advances. That is why we changed our name from the Center for INFORMATION Technology to the Center for INNOVATIVE Technology.

Arguably, the information technology, the IT, revolution has been as momentous as the industrial revolution, but the purpose of CITRIS is to make the IT revolution a different kind of revolution than the industrial, which was full of social upheaval and misery. CITRIS’s real agenda is to make society better. And through CITRIS we can actually be something that makes a powerful, positive difference in people’s lives.