Message from Acting Director Paul Wright
Greetings from Berkeley, California, headquarters of CITRIS, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society. Since its inception, CITRIS has succeeded in channeling innovative research toward societal problems at each of our four University of California campuses (Berkeley, Davis and its Medical Center Campus, Merced, and Santa Cruz). In doing so, it has also served as the focal point of research collaboration between industry, academia and the public, as a conduit for educating a new wave of innovators to enter the workforce, and as a locus of intelligent discourse and innovation. For example, the contributions of CITRIS researchers to wireless sensor network technology have proven instrumental to creating a new industry in radio frequency identification technology (RFID), and we will continue to strive for success as we focus on our five major research initiatives in Energy and the Environment, Intelligent Infrastructures, Healthcare, Services, and Technology for Emerging Regions.
Our Services thrust is an essential component to the CITRIS mission. Economic prosperity and quality of life are strongly tied to service innovation, and services have a large impact, with as much as 81 percent of United States economy defined as services, including banking, education, healthcare, and retail. Traditionally, service innovation has had low rates of success and poor predictability, timeliness, quality, and scalability. However, we are creating fundamental and applied research in science and engineering that will greatly contribute to improving the performance of services. Our mission in services is to engage in scientific, engineering, and computational research that will dramatically improve the performance of services and quality of life.
We have assembled this brochure, which highlights just a few of the services-related projects that we are working on, and hope that it can serve as a basis of discussion for finding mutual research interests that we can pursue together. I would also like to extend an invitation to you to come out to (mostly) sunny California and visit us at CITRIS so that we can discuss these topics in person.