Dear Members and Friends of CITRIS,

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Applying innovative technology to meet the needs of society is central to CITRIS's mission. In this newsletter, we focus on two areas of research that are both pushing the envelope technologically and, at the same time, are improving society here and far away.  We do this out of a sense of idealism and also because, as the cliché goes, “A rising tide floats all boats.” By helping others, we can hope to improve ourselves as well.

Already CITRIS-sponsored projects like ICT4B and Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) are making a big difference in developing countries like India and Sri Lanka. In our first article, "High-Tech, Low-Cost," we bring you the latest news on the progress UC Berkeley faculty and students are making in their efforts to bring ground-breaking and communication technology to the world's poorest citizens.

CITRIS partner campus UC Davis has long been a world leader in environmental research, and in November they received an $8 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to study the links between human health and air pollution. In our second feature, we examine the pioneering work they're doing in the field and how it will help us all breathe easier in the future.

Thank you again for your ongoing interest and support of CITRIS. We hope you feel, as we do, that our work here is making a big difference in the world. We look forward to hearing from you.

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

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CITRIS Awards, Honors, & News

<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="News" --> Ravi Nemana

Ravi Nemana has been appointed the new executive director for CITRIS's Services: Science, Management and Engineering (SSME), a multi-campus initiative to study the science behind the efficient delivery of services, which now make up seventy percent of the U.S. economy. Nemana, most recently a senior advisor for the Health Technology Center in San Francisco, received his M.B.A. in 2000 from UC Davis, where he worked for ten years and co-founded their Center for Health and Technology and the Telemedicine Learning Center. This program has the support of the Information School, Colleges of Engineering and Business at the partner campuses.

The University of California system and Indian scientific organizations sign a landmark agreement on global research that takes the collaboration between the University of California system, with its ten campuses and four Institutes for Science and Innovation (including CITRIS), and leading Indian scientific organizations and universities, to a far deeper level in areas of science, technology, research and education. It will strengthen joint research and educational collaborations and will build on the recent US-India collaborations in engineering education, expanding the focus to a wide range of disciplines aimed at providing solutions to common pressing challenges that will yield long-term benefits to the competitiveness and security of India and the US. India-research-March-2006

Masakazu Toyoda

The first CITRIS-Asia Research Symposium took place on April 10 in Tokyo, Japan and was attended by over 175 attendees from three countries. CITRIS faculty and affiliated researchers presented technical presentations and engaged in discussions about the CITRIS mission of employing research to solve societal-scale challenges.  The presentations and photos from April 10 are now on-line at CITRIS-Asia/presentations_and_photos. The event was followed by a smaller SIG-J event on April 11th for representatives from the companies to ask questions about how to work with CITRIS.

UC Berkeley, UCLA,  UC Santa Barbara, and Stanford University are teaming up to launch what will be one of the world's largest joint research programs focusing on the pioneering technology called "spintronics." The Western Institute of Nanoelectronics (WIN) has been organized to leverage what are now considered the world's best interdisciplinary talents in the field of nanoelectronics. Its mission is to explore and develop advanced research devices, circuits and nanosystems with performance beyond conventional devices. WIN-announcement

The CITRIS White Paper competition for students ends on May 1, and we will announce the winners on our website. The grand prize is $20K for a student or group of students who best describe a multidisciplinary research project that would demonstrate the capacity of IT to help address a major societal challenge.

CITRIS was proud to meet with House Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee of Texas on Friday March 17. Representative Lee sits on the House Committees for Homeland Defense and Science. She stopped by CITRIS headquarters after giving a lecture on immigration at UC Berkeley's law school Boalt Hall.

CITRIS researcher Peidong Yang, a chemistry professor at UC Berkeley, was recently featured in the online magazine sciencematters@cal for his innovative design of a brand new kind of nanowire transistor. While transistors made from nanowires are not new, Yang's innovation is to change the design to three-dimensional, dramatically increasing how densely they can be packed into the same area. The device sprouts vertically from the surface. The other components of the transistor, responsible for controlling the flow of the electricity, surround the vertical wire. http://sciencematters.berkeley.edu/archives/volume3/issue20/story3.php

Angeline Tan has joined CITRIS as the Human Resource Coordinator and is responsible for such things as hiring, recruiting, and benefits consulting. Based at the UC Berkeley headquarters in Hearst Memorial Mining Building, Tan was most recently an HR analyst for the UC Berkeley campus, providing technical support to the online human resources management system. She has an M.A. in Asian studies and a B.A. in Mass Communications, both from UC Berkeley.

Lorie Mariano is a new administrative specialist at CITRIS. She has spent the past five years as an administrative analyst and grant administrator at the Gigascale Silicon Research Center.

Shemida Arteta, who works as an administrative specialist at the UC Berkeley headquarters, has been hard at work on a new venture. Gabriel Joseph Arteta was born on April 27. Congratulations to Shemida, Ron and Jessalyn!

The Friday Research Exchange events at UC Berkeley have been growing in popularity. These talks, which take place every Friday at noon, are webcast live at mms://netshow01.eecs.berkeley.edu/citris and then archived on the website. To see a specific talk, please visit the calendar at event/ and select the desired date and talk to access the video.

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<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature1Title" -->Low Cost, High Tech<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature1Summary" -->A look at three exciting projects that are bringing the benefits of internet and communications technology to those who need it most at a price that's right.<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

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The technology needs of developing nations differ greatly from those in the rest of the world. Lack of basic infrastructure like telephone lines, low literacy rates, limited electricity, and a shortage of qualified IT workers are just some of the challenges researchers face in bridging the digital divide. Clearly it's not enough to simply bring existing technology to the world's poorest; new technology must be created.

This presents a Catch-22, as Eric Brewer, Director of Intel Research Berkeley and co-founder of the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) project, explains. "It’s always harder to create something brand-new that's low cost because the volume would be so low it would be more expensive," says Brewer, who is on leave from his Computer Science professorship at UC Berkeley to run the Intel lablet in Berkeley this year.

Instead of creating new devices and applications from scratch, CITRIS researchers like Brewer and John Canny are coming up with innovative high-tech solutions using inexpensive, off-the-shelf products. Others, such as UC Berkeley Associate Professor of EECS Vivek Subramanian, are pioneering revolutionary new manufacturing techniques that will lower the cost of existing hardware.

Prof. Subramanian bathes in the yellow light of the Printed Electronics Lab. The yellow light is used to avoid damage to photosensitive materials used in the lab.

WiFi That Goes the Distance

In Southern India, rural villagers no longer have to travel 20 kilometers to the Aravind Eye Hospital to speak with a doctor. They can now receive their consultation via a videoconference link. It's just one of the many benefits of a new, point-to-point, long-distance wireless connection that is providing low-cost internet connectivity to a region that before lacked even the most basic telecommunications infrastructure.

A collaboration between TIER and Intel Research Berkeley (Intel is a CITRIS Founding Corporate Member), the project uses existing technology to keep costs down. "We're using off-the-shelf wifi cards, like you might find in a laptop. Those aren't made to go 20 kilometers. But by changing the software and the antennas and other things, you can make them go much further than they're meant to," says Brewer. TIER is currently setting up a test-bed in the Bay Area for meshes of these types of intermittent connections so that, eventually, entire networks of villages could be linked up.

The project has certainly caught the attention of another CITRIS Corporate Founding Member, Hewlett Packard. Says HP University Relations Manager and CITRIS liaison Patrick McGeer: "Imagine a world 10 or 15 years from now where you just get these self-forming networks. Suddenly you're going to be able in the developing world to jump two or three generations of technology. Places that had poor land lines are going to jump past analog land, past analog cellular, past digital cellular to VOIP and pure digital communications, with the entire world carried not from a central server but peer-to-peer over these mesh networks."

McGeer believes that much of the work being done in collaboration with CITRIS researchers at UC Berkeley and other academic and corporate partners on the project PlanetLab, a next-generation Internet platform, will ultimately make these networks more robust and self-managing. That's important because qualified IT professionals are in short supply in developing countries, a problem that the next project indirectly addresses.

More Than Talk

Prof. John Canny and other CITRIS researchers are pioneering ways to provide inexpensive technology to developing countries.

When UC Berkeley EECS professor John Canny began designing computer literacy courses for students in the impoverished Uttar Pradesh region of India, he quickly ran into a problem. "A large fraction of poorer people in India lack the English skills needed to use a computer effectively. For instance, 95% of the web content in India is in English," says Canny, who receives support from CITRIS Founding Corporate Member Microsoft. Making matters worse, many of the nation's poorest must work rather than attend classes, further reducing the chance they'll ever acquire the language skills needed to surf the Web or use most of the available software programs. And English literacy turns out to be a more important economic enabler than computer skills, even in India's "new economy."

To rectify the situation, Canny and his students are working with local NGOs to create speech-based, game-like English language instruction that can be run on a cell phone. Cell phones are very affordable in India. Because a speech-based program would require neither the radio nor the display, it would require very little power. In addition, Canny points out, "The cell phone is hands-free, so it's compatible with a daily lifestyle that demands a lot of menial labor." In other words, kids could learn while they worked.

The challenge lies in the software, which must support a continuous speech interface and  India's numerous regional languages and dialects, on a device approximately 10 times slower than your average desktop PC. Using several accelerating technologies, Canny says they've got the program working up to speed. His team has been collaborating with faculty from the Graduate School of Education to design instruction custom-tailored to this unique and challenging learning environment. Finally, they are working to improve recognizer accuracy using context information, and using design patterns to develop more engaging, effective learning games.

Education isn't the only possible use for a speech-based interface like the one Canny and his students are creating. Brewer sees potential for speech as a new kind of user interface. "The most expensive part of the computer interface is the screen. If you can make it smaller or replace it with a voice interface, it would make it much cheaper," says Brewer, who also points out it would give people with limited literacy the ability to use a computer. He and two students have produced a proposal for the architecture of a speech-controlled hardware device.

Displays for Less

If voice interface offers up one tantalizing possibility for a low-cost interface, a cheaper screen presents another. Imagine a laptop screen that costs only a few dollars to produce and consumes a fraction of the power. Such a screen may soon become a reality thanks to an alternative manufacturing technique developed by Vivek Subramanian and his Organic Electronics Group.

Behind every pixel on a typical laptop screen is a silicon transistor, which is produced using a costly and wasteful method called subtractive processing. In addition, because silicon transistors are opaque, they block part of the light, requiring more power to make the screen bright. That's why as much as 60 percent of power consumption on a laptop computer comes from the display.

Using a novel manufacturing technique that prints transistors and chips using transparent materials, Subramanian's group has successfully produced fully-printed low-cost liquid crystal display cells, and has also produced with transistors for driving these made from transparent printed zinc oxide nanoparticles. Because these cells are transparent, they also require less power to brighten the screen. "Compared to amorphous silicon, our transistors are just as good. There are still a few problems to solve, but it's potentially much cheaper with no real trade-off in performance," says Subramanian.

Displays aren't the only thing that Subramanian's printing technique is making more affordable. It's also being applied to make cheaper RFID tags and sensors.

Benefits for All

Low-cost displays, robust speech-interfaces are technologies, and long-distance wireless networks may have been created with the needs and constraints of the developing world in mind, but it's not difficult to imagine how such innovations will make their way into devices used by people in wealthier nations as well.

For industry, the developing world promises new economic opportunities. "Companies like Intel and Microsoft have covered Western markets. To grow, they have to expand their markets. Working in developing regions is a way to understand these regions and needs and come up with strategies that are appropriate down the road," says Brewer.

Hence, there is a very strong economic case to be made for investment in technology for the developing world. Intel, HP, Microsoft, Qualcomm all key CITRIS sponsors have recognized this and are enthusiastic about supporting deployments in countries like India, China, and Rwanda. The most immediate benefits of the work being done by CITRIS's researchers and corporate partners are not for the developed world alone. We believe at CITRIS that if we can improve the lot of the poorest four billion people of the planet, we will improve society as a whole.

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For more information:

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"Tech is on the way,"
by Jenn Shreve
(CITRIS Newsletter, February 2005)

Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions

Intel Research Berkeley

Speech-Smart Phones

Organic Electronics Group

TIER: Wireless Testbed Project

Planet Lab

CITRIS Project: ICT4B

"Hardware Speech Recognition for user Interfaces in Low Cost, Low Power Devices,"
by Sergiu Nedevschi, Rabin K. Patra, and Eric A. Brewer

"Progress towards development of all-printed RFID tags: Materials, Processes, and Devices,"
by Vivek Subramanian, Jean M. J. Fréchet , Paul C. Chang, Daniel Huang, Josephine B. Lee, Steven E. Molesa, Amanda R. Murphy, David R. Redinger, and Steven K. Volkman
(Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 93, pp. 1330-1338, 2005)

"Davos: How High-Tech Tools Can Help the Poor,"
by Rana Foroohar
(Newsweek, January 28, 2005)

"Upgrading the Internet with PlanetLab"
(HP Labs, May 2005)

Eric Brewer, Intel Berkeley Laboratory

John Canny

Vivek Subramanian

Rick McGeer

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<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature2Title" -->Air Solutions<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature2Summary" -->A new center at CITRIS campus UC Davis is seeking to understand why and how polluted air impacts human health.<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

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If the old adage "a breath of fresh air will do you good" still holds true, so does the opposite: Where air pollution is high, so are rates of illness and death.  

Prof. Wexler studies the effects of air pollutants.
(Photo courtesy of Aldridge, UC Davis)

"Epidemiological studies show that about 50,000 people are dying per year in this country as a result of breathing particles in the air," says Anthony Wexler, a mechanical and aeronautical engineering, civil and environmental engineering, and land, air and water resources professor at UC Davis and director of the campus's Air Quality Research Center.

What isn't known is why. Which particles are the worst offenders? How exactly do they impact the bodies they're breathed into? What are the long-term effects of air pollution on developing lungs?

To answer these questions, Wexler and his colleague Kent Pinkerton, professor of anatomy, physiology, and cell biology in the School of Veterinary Medicine, are co-directing UC Davis's new San Joaquin Valley Aerosol Health Effects Center. Established last November with an $8 million dollar grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, it is one of five centers around the country which will share $40 million dollars over the next five years. All five centers will be working on establishing links between different sources and types of air pollution and their health effects.

"It's increasingly expensive to control air pollution. We want to be able to target what are the sources or types of air pollution that are causing the most harm in terms of health impact," explains Gail Robarge, Assistant Center Director for Air in the EPA's National Center for Environmental Research.

If identifying the air's most damaging particulates will make regulating pollution a more exact and less expensive proposition, Robarge says, then knowing how those pollutants affect the body will enable doctors and public health officials to better protect susceptible populations, especially children, whom earlier studies at UC Davis have shown to be more vulnerable to environmental pollutants than adults.

The new center at UC Davis, one of the four CITRIS campuses, will initially focus on five main areas of research. The first two will examine how air pollution affects pulmonary and cardiovascular systems by exposing heart and lung tissues respond to various particles and studying the effects.

Many commuters who pass through Pleasanton, California live over 75 miles away from their place of work.

Pinpointing what exactly it is about the pollution that's causing health problems is the subject of the third area of research. For this, rats at a remote station in Fresno will be exposed to concentrated amounts of polluted air from the region and then closely monitored for physiological changes. "We'll be measuring the air pollution very carefully'size, distribution, chemical composition'then hopefully see when the animals are worse and figure out what part of the air pollution is causing them to get worse," says Wexler.

The fourth and fifth areas of research, according to Wexler, "think outside the box." One poses the question of where particles go once they're inside the body. To track them, UC Davis researchers will design particles that are similar to what's in the air, only outfitted with radiological properties so they can be seen on a CT scan or MRI. The custom-made particles will be breathed by rats and then traced as they make their way through the animals' bodies.

The last project focuses on how pollution impacts lung development. Already studies at the University of Southern California and UC Davis have shown that early exposure to pollutants can lead to permanent lung damage. "The childhood asthma rate is skyrocketing in certain parts of the world, including Fresno. One reason is that people are being exposed to pollution early in life," says Wexler. He hopes that by looking at how pollution impacts the lungs between birth and adulthood will provide insight into the reasons behind the damage and what can be done to reverse the trend.

With more than 60 researchers dedicated to studying air pollution and a leadership position in the area of environmental studies, UC Davis was an obvious choice to host one of the five centers. But there was another, perhaps more pressing reason, to locate it there: geography. The San Joaquin Valley, where the new center is located, has some of the highest levels of air pollution in the country.

"Fresno and the whole San Joaquin Valley's air quality is getting worse all the time. As the population and transportation increases, it's just going to get worse and worse," says Wexler. That, he says, makes it an ideal place to study the problem as well as implement solutions.

Robarge points out that the benefits of the center's work will spread beyond the region. As the eastern U.S. cuts back on sulfates from coal burning power plants, the mix of particles in the air will increasingly resemble that of California. "While research studying the Valley now is primarily relevant to California air pollution control, we hope a lot of what they do will be applicable across the country in the future," she says.

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For more information:

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National Center for Environmental Research: Airborne Particulate Matter Research Centers

Anthony Wexler's Home Page

UC Davis Wins $8 Million EPA Grant to Study Health Effects of Air Pollution
(UC Davis News & Information, November 15, 2005)

Trough-like San Joaquin Valley suffering in smog
(USA Today, 08/10/2002)

San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District

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