Dear Members and Friends of CITRIS,
Two very different CITRIS projects and a major research review highlight this month’s newsletter. The first article, written from an interview with Professor Diane Harley at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), describes a project aimed at providing a scan of which digital resources are used by undergraduate instructors in humanities and social sciences, how they are being used, and why (or why not). I think you will find the results fascinating.
The second interview is with Scott Shackleton, the assistant dean for capital projects in Berkeley’s College of Engineering, now newly
appointed to head up the construction phase of the new CITRIS Headquarters Building. As the excavation for the building nears
completion and some of the foundation walls are being poured, Scott shares a vision of how the construction will play out and describes some of the features of this important new CITRIS-wide campus resource. View live and archival images of the construction at www.citris-uc.org.
Finally, April 18th is the date for CITRIS’s semi-annual Corporate Sponsor Day. This event is held especially for members of CITRIS’s industrial partner companies and always delivers exciting reports on new research results. The meeting on the 18th will be hosted by UC Santa Cruz and will use facilities at NASA Ames Research Centers in Mountain View, California. Members of CITRIS’s corporate sponsor companies, CITRIS faculty researchers, as well as CITRIS-affiliated graduate student researchers are urged to register.
We hope you enjoy this CITRIS Newsletter. As always we welcome your feedback and are grateful for your interest and support.
Professor Ruzena Bajcsy
Director
Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society
February 2005
- CITRIS hosted Professor Peter Allen from the Computer Sciences Department at Columbia University who spoke on the Berkeley campus about Automating the 3D Modeling Pipeline. Dr. Dorin Comaniciu, a researcher at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, N.J. visited the UC Berkeley campus to present his research on Multi-Model Tracking using Robust Information Fusion.
- The CITRIS ITR Seminar Series presented Danni Wang who spoke on “Research at the Center for the Built Environment.”
- As part of a free lecture series by The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium at UC Berkeley, Rachel Greene, Executive Director of Rhizome.org, spoke on The History of Net Art from 1995 to the Google IPO. Rhizome.org is a nonprofit organization that provides an online platform for the global new media art community.
March 2005
- Congressman Mike Honda (D-San Jose) visited CITRIS Headquarters at UC Berkeley where he viewed several presentations on recent CITRIS research.
- Dan Kammen, Director of the Renewable & Appropriate Energy Laboratory, presented on energy conservation research.
- Kris Pister, Professor at UC Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, demonstrated smart dust technology.
- Lydia Sohn, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley, demonstrated nano-based devices that will one day be used to detect diseases in their early stages.
- Congressman Honda is on the House Committee on Science and was recently elected Senior Democrat of the Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy. UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau presented Congressman Honda with the National Science Coalition’s “Champion of Science Award.”
- The Berkeley Lab Synthetic Biology Seminar Series presented Michael Elowitz, Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Elowitz’s presentation was entitled “Slow, Noisy and Out of Control: Gene Regulation at Single-Cell Levels.”
- As part of a free lecture series by The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium at UC Berkeley, David Byrne, Artist, and Musician, presented his recent work “I [heart] PowerPoint” which utilizes PowerPoint as a means of creative expression of ideas.
- Apple Computer presented the Apple Production Suite, at the UC Berkeley campus. The guest speaker was Vin Capone, Manager of Apple Digital Media.
- The CITRIS ITR Seminar Series presented Saileshwar Krishnamurthy who spoke at UC Berkeley on hared Hierarchical Aggregation in High Fan-In Systems.
- The CITRIS ITR Seminar Series presented David Bindel who spoke at UC Berkeley on the Tools for MEMS Simulation.
April 2005
- UC Santa Cruz will be hosting CITRIS’s Corporate Sponsor Day at the NASA Ames Research Center
in Mountain View, CA. The event will include CITRIS research
highlights, focused talks, student posters, and Industrial Advisory
Board Meeting, and dinner featuring speaker Dr. Dan Werthimer,
principal investigator for SETI@home. - The Berkeley Lab Synthetic Biology Seminar Series presented Peter Schultz, Ph.D. from the Scripps Research Institute. Dr. Schultz’s presentation was entitled “New Opportunities at the Interface of Chemistry and Biology.”
- The Berkeley Lab Synthetic Biology Seminar Series
will present Frances Arnold, Ph.D. from the Division of Chemistry and
Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. Dr.
Arnold’s presentation will be “Design by Directed Evolution: Towards a Cytochrome P450 Monooxygenase.” - The Berkeley Lab Synthetic Biology Seminar Series will present Dr. Michael Savageau from the University of California at Davis. Dr. Savageau’s presentation will be entitled “System Design Principles and Construction of Gene Circuits.”
- The Berkeley Lab Synthetic Biology Seminar Series will present Laurie Zoloth, Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Dr. Zoloth’s presentation will be “May We Make the World?: Ethical Issues in Synthetic Biology.”
- The Berkeley Lab Synthetic Biology Seminar Series will present Angela Belcher, Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Belcher’s presentation will be “Virus-Based Genetic Toolkit for the Directed Synthesis of Magnetic and Semiconducting Nanowires and Self-assembling Structures.”
- As part of a free lecture series by The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium at UC Berkeley, Marko Peljhan from Projekt Atol-Pact Systems and UC Santa Barbara, will present “From Utopian Determinism to Network-Centric Paradigms.”