CITRIS and the Banatao Institute

Creating information technology solutions for society's most pressing challenges

UC Merced

CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, UC Merced continues its path-breaking work in bringing computational innovation to bear on societal problems. Recent developments include forecasting for solar resources, new sensors for environmental monitoring and assessment, intelligent autonomous systems to assist humans in difficult scenarios such as first-response rescue operations, enhanced energy management and controls in buildings, domestic water resource monitoring, and new SmartGRID applications. The Robotics Lab, established in 2007 by Professor Stefano Carpin, investigates topics related to multi-robot systems and humanoid robots. The MESA Lab is pioneering new applications for UAVs, including University of California-wide policies and training for unmanned aerial systems. UC Merced also hosts the Computer Graphics Lab, established in 2006 to pursue novel multidisciplinary research topics in interactive immersive environments; computer animation and simulation; and humanoid robotics.

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UC Receives $22 Million FCC Telehealth Grant

The University of California, in partnership with a coalition of government
agencies, health care providers and others, received a three-year, $22 million
award from the Federal Communications Commission to help develop
a new California Telehealth Network.

UC president to step down

Robert C. Dynes, a renowned physicist who rose to become head of the 10-campus university system, announced Monday his intention to step down as president by June 2008, nearly five years after he took over leadership of the University of California.

Summer of Service Institute shares videos and photos

The Summer of Service Technology Institute won the Special Prize for Best Use of IT for Rural America ($5000 from AT&T) in this year's CITRIS White Paper competition and has now produced a summary video to share how the institute went.

Professor Marcelo Kallmann

Marcelo Kallmann is Assistant Professor and Founding Faculty at the University of California, Merced. He is also affiliated as adjunct faculty to the University of Southern California (USC), where he was working on Autonomous Virtual Humans at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). Before that he did postdocs at the USC Robotics Lab and at the Virtual Reality Lab of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), where he completed his Ph.D. in early 2001. His areas of interest include computer graphics, virtual reality, computer animation and motion planning.

Paul Wright named CITRIS Acting Director

Paul Wright, the current Chief Scientist at CITRIS, has been appointed Acting Director of the institute. Prof. Wright is a professor in Mechanical Engineering and co-director of both the Berkeley Manufacturing Institute and the Berkeley Wireless Research Center.

Stefano Carpin

Associate Professor, School of Engineering
University of California, Merced

Shawn Newsam

Dr. Newsam is an assistant professor in the school of engineering at the University of California, Merced. He joined UC Merced as a founding faculty in July of 2005 after being selected from a pool of over 13,000 applicants for one of 60 inaugural positions. From September 2003 to June 2005, he was a post-doctoral researcher with the Sapphire Scientific Data Mining group in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, his M.S.