CITRIS and the Banatao Institute

Creating information technology solutions for society's most pressing challenges

Nanotechnology

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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.

i4Energy Seminar: The Challenges of Solar Forecasting: Reducing the Cost of Solar Power Through Research

The Solar Forecasting Laboratory at the University of California Merced has collected over 15 months of high quality horizontal and direct normal irradiance measurements at different wavelengths (UV, IR and visible) with the primary objective of developing, calibrating and benchmarking novel and more accurate forecasting models for solar irradiance at the ground level. Without effective forecasting methodologies, neither solar nor wind power plants cannot be effectively connected to the power grid, which presents a major obstacle for high-penetration utilization of intermittent sources.

Research Exchange: Molecule Counting Technology for Personalized Healthcare

Knowledge is power. Knowing of the quantities of specific molecules present in a biological system is fundamental to understanding systems level operation. This understanding is critical for translating basic knowledge of specific molecules into applied medical, agriculture, forensic, and drug development assays, and has created a need for methods that more accurately quantify an ever-increasing number of newly identified analytes with greater precision.

Valeria La Saponara

Dr. Valeria La Saponara received her Bachelor’s degree in 1994 in aerospace engineering from the University of Naples, Italy. She worked as a research fellow at the MARS Center, Italy, a subcontractor of NASA and the European Space Agency. She then went to the U.S. and completed her Master’s and Ph.D. in 2001, both in aerospace engineering, from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Matthew Guthaus

Matthew Guthaus received his BSE in Computer Engineering in 1998, MSE in 2000, and PhD in 2006 in Electrical Engineering from The University of Michigan (UM). Matthew is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Computer Engineering department. His research interests are in high-performance and low-power clock distribution; design for variability and reliability; and computer-aided design of Integrated Circuits.

Anna Scaglione

Prof. Anna Scaglione received the Laurea (M.Sc. degree) in 1995 and the Ph.D. degree in 1999 from the University of Rome, “La Sapienza.” She is currently Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of California, Davis, where she joined in 2008. She was previously at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, from 2001 where became Associate Professor in 2006; prior to joining Cornell she was Assistant Professor in the year 2000-2001, at the University of New Mexico.

CITRIS and the New Year 2010

– CITRIS Director Paul Wright delivers a message for the New Year –

CITRIS is a symbol of everything wonderful that the UC system offers
the world in terms of education, research, and service. Several hundred
graduate and undergraduate students on four campuses are funded by the
national and international extra-mural grants that are brought into the
UC system because of CITRIS. Our work covers energy, water, healthcare,
and infrastructures and, by being multi-disciplinary, our students come
from all walks of life.

2010 MDV Innovators Award Winners Announced

The 2010 Mohr Davidow Ventures Innovators Award Winners have been announced. Mohr Davidow Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm investing in pioneering science, has announced that among its winners are Ali Javey from UC Berkeley and Delia Milliron from LBNL

Lydia Sohn

Almy C. Maynard and Agnes Offield Maynard Chair in Mechanical Engineering, UC Berkeley

Prof. Carey receives award from Hewlett-Packard

Professor Van P. Carey, CITRIS researcher and UC Berkeley professor of Mechanical Engineering recently received an award from Hewlett-Packard as part of a growing research effort on sustainable energy technologies in the Energy and Information Technologies (EIT) Laboratory that he founded with CITRIS seed funding. Prof. Carey has attracted more that $250,000 in new funding for this lab in recently awarded grants from HP and UC Discovery.