CITRIS and the Banatao Institute

Creating information technology solutions for society's most pressing challenges

Nanotechnology

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Big Ideas finalists for 2013

Big Ideas@Berkeley is an annual innovation contest aimed at providing funding, support, and encouragement to interdisciplinary teams of UC undergraduate and graduate students who have “big ideas.”

Research Exchange: Designing Energy-Efficient Integrated Circuits and Systems

As traditional CMOS technology scaling has essentially ended, electronic systems can no longer simply increase functionality or performance without dissipating more power. In order to surmount this challenge and enable many emerging applications, integrated circuit designers must turn their attention to energy efficiency as their primary driver.

TRUST Security Seminar: Coordination and Control of Distributed Energy Resources for Provision of Ancillary Services

On the distribution side of a power system, there exist many distributed energy resources (DERs) that can be potentially used to provide ancillary services to the grid they are connected to. An example is the utilization of power electronics grid interfaces commonly used in distributed generation to provide reactive power support. While the primary function of these power electronics-based systems is to control active power flow, when properly controlled, they can also be used to provide reactive power support.

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.

TRUST Security Seminar: Secure Information Flow in Trust Networks

Who is responsible for the harm and risk of security flaws? The advent of worldwide networks such as the internet made software security (or the lack of software security) became a problem of international proportions. There are no mathematical/statistical risk models available today to assess networked systems with interdependent failures. Without this tool, decision-makers are bound to overinvest in activities that don’t generate the desired return on investment or under invest on mitigations, risking dreadful consequences. Experience suggests that no party is solely responsible for the harm and risk of software security flaws but a model of partial responsibility can only emerge once the duties and motivations of all parties are examine and understood. State of the art practices in software development won’t guarantee products free of flaws.

UC Berkeley team wins PR2 Robot

After an intense competition, a UC Berkeley team located on the 7th floor of the CITRIS Headquarters Building was awarded with a PR2 robot. The team, led by Pieter Abbeel, will continue developing open source code for robotics.