Dear Members and Friends of CITRIS,
New beginnings are always cause for excitement, and the two covered in the first newsletter of 2006 are no exception.
In our first feature we look at the emerging field of services,
which today accounts for the largest part of the U.S. economy.
Universities have an important role to play in conducting research that
will innovate current services and create future ones, as well as
preparing graduates to meet the demands of today and tomorrow's
workforce. This is why I'm especially proud to announce the launch of a
new certificate program in Services: Science, Management, and
Engineering, which I believe is going to further this emerging research
and academic agenda in a big way. I hope you will read the article to
learn about everything CITRIS is doing to further this new discipline.
The University of California's newest member, UC Merced, is the
topic of our second article. Starting departments and building research
agendas from the ground up creates opportunities that simply don't
exist at more established institutions. No wonder the CITRIS campus is
attracting top faculty, students, and industrial partners.
We are especially grateful for your ongoing interest and support of
CITRIS throughout this new year. As always, thank you for your
continued interest and support. We look forward to hearing from you.
Professor Shankar Sastry
Director
Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society
- The University of California, Santa Cruz, and Los Alamos National Laboratory have agreed to establish a new collaborative institute
for research and education in the area of scientific data management.
The Institute for Scalable Scientific Data Management (ISSDM) will
address looming issues of data storage and management for projects that
involve large-scale simulation and computing. - The Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems (RAD) lab has been established at UC Berkeley
with support from Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems to help
entrepreneurs make their innovations available to as wide an audience
as possible. - Alex Pang and Paul Wright have joined the leadership of CITRIS. Pang is the new Chief Scientist for the UC Santa Cruz campus, and Wright is the Chief Scientist for the UC Berkeley campus.
- Anthony
Wexler, the director of the San Joaquin Valley Aerosol Health Effects
Center, has received an $8 million EPA grant to study the effects of
pollution on human health. Wexler is a mechanical and aeronautical
engineering professor at UC Davis and an expert in analyzing chemical
and physical characteristics of airborne particles. - A recent study led by Dan Kammen and Alex Farrell of the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley, demonstrated that putting ethanol instead of gasoline in your tank saves oil and is probably no worse for the environment than burning gasoline.
- Ben
Yoo, professor of electrical and computer engineering and CITRIS
Affiliate Director, UC Davis, is co-principal investigator for a study
funded by a $9.5 million DARPA grant. Titled "Optical Arbitrary
Waveform Generation for Ultrahigh Resolution Sensing and Imaging," the
project seeks to achieve unprecedented levels of performance for
ultra-broadband coherent optical systems and enable dramatic advances
in such applications as high-resolution 3-D imaging, novel chemical
sensing and ultra-broadband optical communications. - The Friday Research Exchange meetings,
which take place from noon to 1pm on the UC Berkeley campus, have been
a great way of presenting and discussing new research initiatives at
CITRIS. Check out the upcoming meeting schedule at through our events
calendar. - On February 15, IBM research and UC Berkeley lecturer emeritus Jean Paul Jacob presented a talk at UC Berkeley entitled, “The Future: It’s not what it used to be!” at 4:00 p.m. in 306 Soda Hall.
- A panel on February 22 on the UC Berkeley campus will examine the Future of Enterprise Technology.
- Please
join us for the CITRIS poster session during this year’s BEARS
conference on Feb. 23 from 3:00-5:00 p.m. in the Betty & Gordon
Moore Lobby of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building on the UC Berkeley
campus. - Dr. Mark Dean of IBM spoke on January 30 as
part of the CITRIS Distinguished Speaker Series on “Opportunities for
Innovation in the IT Industry,” and a webcast of his talk is available. - The
CITRIS headquarters would like to welcome three new staff members.
Khossrov Taherian is the new multimedia coordinator, and Hazel Palaski
is the new executive assistant for both CITRIS and Director Shankar
Sastry. Khossrov is an expert on computer networking and comes to us
from Berkeley’s EECS, where he spent eight years in the electronics
support group. Hazel, who has a background in secondary education, has
worked the last two years as the executive assistant for the Vice
Chancellor at UC Berkeley. - And finally, bids for the
new CITRIS headquarters on the UC Berkeley campus are due during the
third week of February, and construction is scheduled to begin
mid-March. Two web cameras will be positioned so that the construction
can be viewed worldwide. More information will be available on our
homepage soon.