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.

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.

Research Exchange: Research to Further Education

As a nation, over half of our students fail Algebra every year. Agile Mind was founded with the mission of changing what happens between educators and students in the classroom in ways that improve the quality of instruction of high school mathematics and science, especially in underserved areas.

Dr. Gary Baldwin dies at 67

Dr. Gary Baldwin, Director of Special Projects, CITRIS @ Berkeley, passed away on November 16, 2010, after a short battle with cancer.

Research Exchange: Formal Methods for Dependable Computing: From Models, through Software, to Circuits

Computing has become ubiquitous and indispensable: it is embedded all around us, in cell phones, automobiles, medical devices, and much more. This ubiquity brings with it a growing challenge to ensure that our computing infrastructure is also dependable and secure. We need to develop and maintain complex software systems on top of increasingly unreliable computing substrates under stringent resource constraints such as energy usage.

Research Exchange: Leveraging Machine-learning and Crowdsourcing to Process Text Messages in the world’s Less-resourced Language

Text-messaging has quickly become the dominant form of remote communication in much of the world, surpassing email, phone calls and even grid electricity. This has social development and crisis response organizations to leverage mobile technologies to support health, banking, access to market information, literacy and emergency response.

Research Exchange: The Google Book Settlement as Copyright Reform

The proposed Google Book Search (GBS) settlement can be viewed as a way to achieve copyright reform through the class action settlement process. This is especially evident in its plan for commercializing orphan works and in the compromises it embodies concerning revenue splits for authors and publishers in respect of ambiguous contracts about e-book rights and its new procedures to ensure that author reversion rights will be effectuated.

Workshop: Enabling Technologies Development Project

The goal is to develop new and innovative technologies that will lead to 10x the capabilities of current products at 1/10x the cost. An additional even more challenging goal is to also achieve 10x reliability. The intent of the project is to also promote research collaboration between the universities, national laboratories, and private industry.