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