Education

The need for language aids is pervasive in today's world. Millions of individuals with language and speech challenges require additional support for language understanding and learning. Currently, however, these needs are not being met because there are not enough skilled teachers, interpreters, and professionals to give them the one on one attention that they need. Lipreading (speechreading because it involves more than just the lips) allows deaf and hard of hearing individuals to perceive and understand oral language and even to speak.

Today, approximately 50% of kindergartners in the United States are from families with one or more risk factors for school failure. Lack of school readiness for children from disadvantaged backgrounds due to social, physical, or economic factors is related to inadequate language, literacy, and early math experiences in early childhood. Schools in Oakland California, with students’ diverse socioeconomic background, face such challenges.

 

The Wikipedia is a source of information widely used in homes, schools, and offices across California, and across the nation. The Wikipedia is also the most successful, and influential, example of collaborative content creation. Most Wikipedia articles can be edited by anyone. This openness has been a key factor in the success of the Wikipedia, but it also poses challenges. Rogue, misinformed, or misguided contributors can corrupt articles with incorrect information, and it is difficult for readers to judge the reliability of the information they are presented.

The capture of sensory data in three spatial dimensions in real time from multiple physically separate spaces, the projection of the data into shared virtual environments, and the projection of the virtual environments into immersive physical environments, constitute the emerging technology of tele-immersion.

Cryptography is a fundamental building block for building information systems, and as we enter the so-called "information age" of global networks, ubiquitous computing devices, and electronic commerce, we can expect that the cryptography will become only more important with time.

The goal of this work is to develop a system for web-based science and engineering instruction, and use it to develop innovative curricula. Initially we are targeting introductory programming courses in EECS at UC Berkeley, which will in turn be made available to UC Merced and as part of a new common freshman engineering curriculum being developed at UC Berkeley.

This large National SCience Foundation Information Technology Research (NSF ITR) is an umbrella grant for many CITRIS activities, and supports both fundamental work in the above listed CITRIS technologies (rows) and driving applications (columns), as well as synergies among them.
The driving applications include
(1) boosting efficiency of energy production and consumption, and
(2) saving lives and property and establishing emergency response IT infrastructure in the wake of disasters, among others.