CITRIS and the Banatao Institute

Creating information technology solutions for society's most pressing challenges

UC Santa Cruz

Proximity to Silicon Valley makes UC Santa Cruz a natural place to engage the world’s industrial leaders and put new technology solutions to work. CITRIS Santa Cruz explores the design of new systems for immersive video and augmented reality, intelligent media for social good, and exploring the intersection of computing approaches from artificial intelligence, computer graphics, and software engineering with art and design. Creating new forms of interactive media with autonomous, generative, and dynamic responses to interaction has broad applications to fields from education, health, and entertainment to security and safety.

CITRIS Santa Cruz also examines the societal impact of CPS and IoT. Just as desktop computers and personal computing became commonplace decades ago, consumers are now acclimating to the idea that the objects they handle, the media they use, and the services they employ to process information are embedded with intelligence to improve everyday life.

Contact CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, Santa Cruz

Visit the CITRIS Santa Cruz website

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Christopher Wilmers

Large predators often have disproportionately large impacts on ecosystems relative to other organisms, yet they have been vastly understudied relative to other taxonomic groups. With most large predators now in decline worldwide, our lab group’s focus is to better understand the physiology, behavior and ecology of predators so as to better inform their management and conservation. Our interests within this space are broad, however our current focus is on three main questions:

1. How do consumers influence population through community response to climate change?

DASH to the Next Gen of Robots: Small, Cheap, and Feral

The Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod is a micro-robot made of paperboard and off-the-shelf electronics that could assist in recovery from natural disasters by crawling into spaces too dangerous for rescue workers to enter.

February Newsletter is online

The latest CITRIS newsletter is now online, witha story about a micro-robot made of paperboard and off-the-shelf electronics that could assist in recovery from natural disasters, and an interview with Greg Niemeyer, who creates games that can help engage people with serious issues, particularly that of climate change.

CITRIS Faculty Weigh in on COP15

On December 7, 2009, representatives of the world’s governments convene
in Copenhagen, Denmark, seeking agreement between nations to regulate
and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions after 2012, when the current
treaty, known as the Kyoto Protocol, expires.

Professor Yi Zhang

Yi Zhang is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include information retrieval, text mining, statistical machine learning, and natural language processing. She has collaborated with start-ups, large corporations and government agencies on related topics. Dr. Zhang received her Ph.D. and M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University. She is working with SSRC on the Distributed Metadata Management project, focusing on how to use rich key-value metadata to allow users to interactively navigate and search distributed file systems.

Professor Jim Whitehead

Jim Whitehead is an Associate Professor and Chair of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he helped create the Computer Game Design program. He is also the founder and board chair of the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games, which hosts the yearly Foundations of Digital Games conference. Jim’s research interests in the area of games include level design and procedural content generation. In the field of software engineering, Jim performs research on software bug prediction, software repository mining, and software evolution.

John Vesecky

Professor John Vesecky’s technical interests are in the areas of remote sensing of the ocean surface; ocean current measuring radar for coastal ecology and oceanography, radar and radar systems, especially synthetic aperture radar (SAR); wave scattering; remote sensing and public health; global change. Prior to joining the faculty at UCSC he was a Professor of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Professor Ajujan Varma

Anujan Varma is a Professor and Graduate Director in the Computer Engineering Department at UCSC. He holds a Masters in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from University of Southern California. He was previously employed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center from 1986 to 1991.

Holger Schmidt

Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Narinder Singh Kapany Chair of Optoelectronics, UC Santa Cruz

Professor Jose Renau

Research Interests

Computer architecture with focus on complexity, temperature, reliability. To gain further insights systems (SCOORE) are built on FPGAs and ASICs.

Professor Raquel Prado

Raquel Prado is Associate Professor of Statistics in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at UCSC. Her current research is in non-stationary and multivariate time series analysis. Her book, Time Series: Modeling, Computation, and Inference was published earlier this year.

Research Areas

Bayesian non-stationary time series modeling, multivariate time series, biomedical signal processing and statistical genetics.

Professor Nader Pourmand

Dr. Pourmand is the head of the Biosensors and Bioelectrical Technology Group, as well as, director of the Genome Sequencing Center at UCSC’s Baskin School of Engineering. Dr. Pourmand’s ongoing research strives to develop new techniques and assays for biomedical applications. Because the nature of science is ever changing, Dr. Pourmand and his team of researchers work diligently in order to be innovative and proactive when it comes to research, collaboration, and discovery.