Message from Acting Director Paul Wright
Greetings from Berkeley, California, headquarters of CITRIS, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society. We are committed to improving the world by developing innovative technology through research at our four University of California campuses (Berkeley, Davis, Merced, and Santa Cruz) and through collaborations with public-private partnerships. CITRIS has already had a major success by creating a new industry with our contributions to wireless sensor network technology, and we will continue to strive for success as we focus on five major thrust areas. Those thrusts are: Energy and the Environment, Intelligent Infrastructure, Healthcare, Services, and Technology for Emerging Regions.
Our Energy and the Environment thrust is an essential component to the CITRIS mission, and one that is personal to me. As climate change becomes more indisputable each day and the world population expands and industrializes at a rapid rate, we must find energy solutions that continue to improve the quality of life while not adversely affecting the environment. CITRIS offers a variety of energy and environmental related research. Some of the areas that we are currently working on include conservation and energy efficiency; renewable energy; nuclear energy; and carbon capture and storage, just to name a few. Also, we are creating a new research center for Smart Sustainable Energy Technologies (CSSET) that will tackle efficiency and alternative energy issues by utilizing multi-disciplinary research.
We have assembled this brochure, which highlights just a few of the energy 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 the (mostly) sunny California and visit us at CITRIS so that we can discuss these topics in person.
I will end this message with the last line that I frequently use in lectures about energy and the environment, and I hope it rings true to you: “It is hard to find a good planet…and this is the only one that we have.”