CITRIS and the Banatao Institute

Creating information technology solutions for society's most pressing challenges

UC Berkeley

The headquarters of CITRIS and the Banatao Institute are located in Sutardja Dai Hall (SDH) on the UC Berkeley campus. Specially designed to house this interdisciplinary research institute, the building contains 141,000 sq. feet of laboratory space for collaborative research, faculty offices, the 149-seat Banatao Auditorium, conference rooms on each floor, and modern classrooms. SDH also hosts the CITRIS Invention Lab, a rapid prototyping space used by UC entrepreneurs in our CITRIS Foundry startup accelerator program and the student maker community. The Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory occupies a two-story, 15,000-square-foot wing of Sutardja Dai Hall where academic and industry researchers develop prototypes for new biosensors, photonics devices, and other MEMS/NEMS sensors. SDH is equipped with hundreds of sensors and sophisticated systems for building management that form a living laboratory on campus for energy research and proof-of-concept demonstrations.

Contact CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, UC Berkeley

Letter from the Director, Feb. 2011

For the last decade, we at CITRIS have focused our efforts there, developing intelligent technologies that help measure, track, and manage water, energy, and other key resources in innovative ways that benefit the economy, the environment, and our quality of life.

Water Sense: CITRIS MOTES and Wireless Networks Deployed to Help Monitor and Manage California’s Water Supply

A CITRIS-supported collaboration between scientists at UC Merced and UC Berkeley professor is deploying networks of wireless sensors in a prototype project at the National Science Foundation’s Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory. The sensors measure snow depth and other environmental factors that, once known, will allow much better measurement and prediction of the availability of our most precious resource.

CITRIS Research Wins Award

Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy’s research in “Tele-Immersion for Physicians” was recently awarded the CENIC 2011 Innovations in Networking Award for High Performance Research Applications.

Xiang Zhang

Xiang Zhang is the inaugural Ernest S. Kuh Endowed Chaired Professor at UC Berkeley and the Director of NSF Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC). He is also a Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

Professor Zhang is an elected member of National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and Fellow of four scientific societies: APS (The American Physical Society), OSA (The Optical Society of America), AAAS (The American Association for the Advancement of Science), and SPIE (The International Society of Optical Engineering).

Masayoshi Tomizuka

Tomizuka’s research covers control theory and its applications to various mechanical systems. A balance between theory and laboratory work is emphasized. The trend in mechanical system design is to replace mechanical complexity with electronics and computers (real time controllers) in order to gain high performance, reliability and flexibility. A number of control methodologies relevant to mechanical systems are under investigation in his research group: they include optimal control, preview control, adaptive control, and nonlinear robust control.

Mark Stacey

My research activity is in the area of environmental fluid mechanics, with a focus on the physical processes that govern fluid motions and the interdisciplinary implications of transport and mixing in estuarine and coastal environments.

Fritz Sommer

Research Interests

Many impressive capabilities of the brain are not yet understood, for example, abilities in perception to rapidly analyze cluttered visual scenes, spoken language, morse code or the virtually unlimited capacity of our long-term memory. My lab investigates the theoretical principles how neurons and networks in the brain collaborate and organize to produce perception, memory and ultimately cognition. To study these issues we develop computational models of the brain, as well as advanced techniques of data analysis.

Isha Ray

Isha Ray joined the faculty of the Energy and Resources Group in January 2002. She has a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Somerville College, Oxford University, and a PhD in Applied Economics from the Food Research Institute at Stanford University. Before coming to ERG, she was an analyst on economics and institutions at the Turkey office of the International Water Management Institute, and then a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow at UCB’s Geography Department.

Claudia Ostertag

Professor Ostertag’s research interests are in fiber-reinforced concrete, mechanical behavior and toughening mechanisms.

Shmuel Oren

Dr. Shmuel S. Oren is the Earl J. Isaac Professor in the Science and Analysis of Decision Making in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University of California, Berkeley and former Chairman of that department. Over the last twelve years he has served as the Berkeley site director of PSerc — a multi-university Power Systems Research Center sponsored by the National Science Foundation and industry members. He is also Co-Chair of the Management of Technology Program of the College of Engineering and Haas School of Business at Berkeley.

Kyriakos Komvopoulos

Professor Kyriakos Komvopoulos has been a faculty member of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley since 1989. He is internationally known for pioneering research in surface nanosciences and nanoengineering with important implications in several emerging technologies including communications, microelectronics, information storage, and biotechnology.

Maggi Kelly

I am a geographer, broadly trained in geospatial technologies and natural-human system interactions. I am interested in functional mapping of environment using innovative methods, multiple data sources, and when appropriate, volunteered geographic information. Functional mapping seeks to capture in spatial form the structure of a natural or social system in order to understand system function, management context, and possible consequences of change or management decisions on pattern and process.

Michael Frenklach

Research Interests:

Chemical kinetics; Computer modeling; Combustion chemistry; Pollutant formation (NOx, soot); Shock tube; Chemical vapor deposition of diamond films; Homogeneous nucleation of silicon, silicon carbide, and diamond powders; Interstellar dust formation.

Trevor Darrell

Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley; founding co-director of Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR)