Have you noticed? Danes are starting to flock the campus. This is due to a new partnership between CITRIS and Innovation Center Denmark, which is a Danish satellite here in the Bay Area. The partnership involves joint conferences and workshops as well as Visiting Scholarships at CITRIS. With Sutardja Dai Hall headquarters being fully operational, there is now space to engage companies and other universities more deeply in collaboration and technology transfer. Many companies and government organizations such as Innovation Center Denmark are very interested in making use of the space to facilitate broader exposure to CITRIS research and to engage more deeply in funded collaborations with faculty. In 2011, CITRIS will host 8 visitors from Denmark, and by the end of the year, a total of 23 Danish researchers will have been visiting scholars over the past two years. In the above photo are all of the Denmark visitors from 2010 during a CITRIS-DASTI workshop in October 2010, with Professor Ed Arens from Center for The Built Environment.
Amongst these are two Danish Ph.D. students, Martin Lykke Rytter Jensen and Hans Martin Maersk-Moeller, who are pursuing their doctorates in software engineering. Martin and Martin recently worked with their host, UC Berkeley professor David Culler, on the LoCal project, which aims to investigate Information Age approaches for managing society’s most limited resource: energy. Essentially, the LoCal Energy Network is “a cyber overlay on the energy distribution system”. The partnership has also resulted in a successful joint application for $25M to research, develop and implement the smart grid of tomorrow.
A previous Danish researcher in the program, Monika Frontczak, spent time at the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) at UC Berkeley. She noted that her “research stay at CBE was highly profitable and fruitful for [her] Ph.D. studies. The stay at CBE was also a great personal experience. I learnt working and communicating with people from different cultures, which will ease the future cooperation in the international scientific environment.”Another visitor at CBE, Associate Professor Jørn Toftum from the Technical University of Denmark, had such a successful visit that he has now built a partnership with his hosts, who will visit him in Denmark to work on a new collaborative project.
Danish visiting scholars who are currently at CITRIS include:
• Lelai Zhou, who is studying with UC Berkeley professor Ken Goldberg
• Bjoern Groenbaek, who is working with UCSC engineering professors Sri Kurniawan and Roberto Manduchi
• Lasse Juel Larsen, who works with UC Berkeley professor Greg Niemeyer
• Roberto Rodes, who is in the lab of UC Berkeley professor Connie Chang-Hasnain.
To learn more about the program:
Lars B. Nielsen
Research and technology attaché
lbn@innovationcenterdenmark.com / +1 650 353 8879