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

CSE in Cloud: Computational Science and Engineering will use Yahoo!’s cloud computing cluster to conduct large-scale research

Yahoo! today announced that it has expanded its partnerships with top
U.S. universities to advance cloud computing research. The University
of California at Berkeley, Cornell University and the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst will join Carnegie Mellon University in using
Yahoo!’s cloud computing cluster to conduct large-scale systems
software research and explore new applications that analyze
Internet-scale data sets, ranging from voting records to online news
sources.

Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy Awarded 2009 Benjamin Franklin Medal

Professor and CITRIS Director Emeritus Ruzena Bajcsy was recently awarded the Franklin Institute's 2009 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. Prof. Bajcsy received the award for contributions to robotics and computer vision, specifically the development of active perception and the creation of methods to improve our understanding of medical images.

Dedication of new CITRIS headquarters

The newest research facility on the campus of UC Berkeley was dedicated on Friday, Feb. 27, and embodies the innovation and entrepreneurship needed to fuel economic growth and arrives at a time when the state and nation seek relief from the recession. Photos and video

Taming Buildings a la Carte

Mobile commissioning cart permits quick evaluation and analysis of buildings’ efficiency.

CITRIS study on SF public cameras released

UC Berkeley and CITRIS-affiliated researchers Jennifer King (School of Law), Professor Deirdre Mulligan (School of Information), and Professor Steven Raphael
(School of Public Policy) recently released a comprehensive evaluation
of San Francisco's public surveillance camera system.

Professor Eli Yablonovitch

Eli Yablonovitch is the Director of the NSF Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science (E3S), a multi-University Center headquartered at Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. degree in Applied Physics from Harvard University in 1972. He worked for two years at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and then became a professor of Applied Physics at Harvard. In 1979 he joined Exxon to do research on photovoltaic solar energy. Then in 1984, he joined Bell Communications Research, where he was a Distinguished Member of Staff, and also Director of Solid-State Physics Research. In 1992 he joined the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was the Northrop-Grumman Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering. Then in 2007 he became Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley, where he holds the James & Katherine Lau Chair in Engineering.

Professor Michel Maharbiz

Michel M. Maharbiz is a Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the extreme miniaturization of technology focused on building synthetic interfaces to cells and organisms. He is one of the inventors of “neural dust”, an ultrasonic interface for vanishingly small implants in the body. His group is also known for developing the world’s first remotely radio-controlled cyborg beetles.

Pieter Abbeel

Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and Co-Director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence (BAIR) Lab.

Peter Bartlett

Professor in the Division of Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley.

Big Ideas @ Berkeley Marketplace

The Big Ideas @ Berkeley marketplace allows individuals to
support undergraduate and graduate students who are passionate about tackling
major global, regional, and local challenges such as clean energy, the
environment, public health, safe drinking water, public policy, and
technology-based entrepreneurship.

UC Berkeley and Nokia turn mobile phones into traffic probes with launch of pilot traffic-monitoring software

Drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area with GPS-enabled mobile phones can now tap into new technology that promises to transform traffic monitoring.  Researchers have publicly released pilot software that turns cellular devices into mobile traffic probes providing real-time information on traffic flow and travel times. (Below: College of Engineering Dean Shankar Sastry opens this briefing to visitors and media.)

Check your carbon footprint at CoolClimate Calculator

The CoolClimate Calculator (http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu) has been developed by researchers at the Berkeley Institute of the Environment to help US households evaluate their complete climate footprints, including all direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, household energy, food, goods and services.

Copenhagen Climate Congress

The University of Copenhagen is hosting an
international scientific congress on climate change March 10-12, 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Findings will be compiled in a book on climate
change, and an excecutive summary will be handed
over to policy makers at the COP15.

The Deadline for paper submissions for the Copenhagen Climate Congress is November 1, 2008.

October Newsletter is online

The October newsletter is now online, featuring stories games for medical diagnosis and technology for giving voices to disenfranchised communities.