February '05 Newsletter

February 1, 2005

Dear Members and Friends of CITRIS,

Professor Ruzena Bajcsy, the Founding Director of CITRIS, stepped down on November 1, 2004, from her position to return to her research and teaching the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Berkeley. Although the official date of her return to full time teaching and research was November 1, she stayed on in her position until a new director is able to assume this role.

"Ruzena's leadership of CITRIS throughout its critical start-up phase to the present has been outstanding. Her passion for the role that information technology can play in improving the lives of Californians, as well as people throughout the world, has set an important tone for the Institute," said former UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl.

In his role as Chancellor, Berdahl also served as the Director and Chairman of the CITRIS Governing Board, a position from which he gave strong support to CITRIS and which permitted careful observation of the launch phase and growth of the Institute.

"CITRIS has become a model for collaboration between UC campuses and industry," said Chancellor Berdahl. Under Prof. Bajcsy's leadership, more than 200 faculty from four campuses have become involved with CITRIS. She has aggressively sought and promoted collaborations with a growing list of international industrial partners, expanding that group well beyond its initial size. She has expanded the societal impact of the research in CITRIS by championing strong interactions with researchers in the social sciences, humanities, law, and business.

Prof. Bajcsy's own research in real-time 3D visualization and image transmission ("tele-immersion") is beginning to have enormous implications in the field of distance learning, medicine, and the arts. Interested readers may wish to visit the website for this project at citris.citris-uc.org/about_citris/tele.htm.

All of her faculty colleagues, her industrial partners, and the staff of CITRIS extend to Prof. Bajcsy the fondest wishes for continued success in her teaching, research, and contributions to society. "We are fortunate that Ruzena will remain at Berkeley as a faculty member; she will still be very much involved in CITRIS as she provides continuity and continued counsel in the operation of the Institute," said Gary Baldwin, the Executive Director of CITRIS. "Her contributions have been seminal. She will be sorely missed on a day-to-day basis, but we hope she knows that she won't get off easily; we plan to call on her often for her continuing insights and guidance."

We hope you enjoy this issue of the CITRIS newsletter.

CITRIS Awards, Honors, & News

February 2005

CITRIS is having an Open House as part of the Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium (BEARS) on Thursday, February 10th from 1:00-3:00 p.m. Our Open house will be in Room 475 of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building. We will have informational posters, demonstrations, and complimentary box lunches.

January 2005

CITRIS research highlighted in San Francisco Chronicle article by Thomas Kalil, special assistant to the chancellor for science and technology at UC Berkeley.
Axel Techmer, researcher at Infineon Technologies, presented "Embedded vision platform for video surveillance systems" at the UC Berkeley campus.
Laurence Clarke, Branch Chief for the National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute, spoke at the UC Berkeley campus. He discussed the National Cancer Institute's plans for Imaging Informatics and Data Integration.

December 2004

In cooperation with Berkeley's Center for Health Research and Tekes, the National Technology Agency of Finland, CITRIS organized a one-day conference to discuss the future of wireless and embedded technology in health care.

November 2004

CITRIS, along with the three other California Institutes for Science and Innovation, received a permanent operating budget which ensured continued operations as we move forward with our building plans and research agenda.
Live web cameras activated to document construction of new Davis Hall North building, future headquarters for CITRIS at UC Berkeley: 1). The Co-Opticon Camera atop Cory Hall and 2). A camera located in Soda Hall is collecting high resolution images for a Time-Lapse experience of the construction site.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony introduced the new Vodafone Laboratory, which will provide space for wireless education and research at the UC Berkeley campus.
CITRIS received the spotlight in a San Francisco Business Times article. (PDF file)
Sun's High Performance Computing Consortium:
"Bridging Research Communities" took place in Pittsburgh, PA.

October 2004

CITRIS's new Berkeley campus headquarters building had its Ground breaking ceremony!
CITRIS had its Corporate Sponsor Day at UC Davis.
Tele-Immersion research was highlighted in The Daily Californian.
Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy presented at the Center for Research and Education in Aging's daylong conference: "Enabling Technology for the Aging Population: From the Lab to the Home."

September 2004

CITRIS co-sponsored The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium Lecture Series at UC Berkeley.

July 2004

Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy to step down as Director of CITRIS.
UC Berkeley launches search for new CITRIS Director.

Tech is on the way

In December, as massive tsunamis inflicted unprecedented devastation on the countries of Southeast Asia and well beyond, Eric Brewer, U.C. Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS), and a team of eight graduate students and Intel researchers were preparing to depart for the troubled region.

As part of a vast, five-year CITRIS-affiliated program called Information and Communication Technology for Billions (ICT4B), Brewer, the principal investigator, and his team are spending the first half of 2005 working with local residents, non-governmental organizations, and industry partners in India and Sri Lanka to install and study new technology developed specifically for the four billion people worldwide who live on less than $2000 per year. College of Engineering Dean Richard Newton has compared the program to "a peace corps for technology."

"Life in these regions is fragile on a good day, so when something goes catastrophically wrong, it's far worse than the same thing would be here. Technology can help," says Brewer.

In fact, there's evidence that it already has. A former resident who'd received some technical training was able to call the one of the few phones in his Indian fishing village, Nellavadu, warning them in time to evacuate. Although 300 perished in a neighboring village, everyone in Nellavadu survived. "That's proof that even a very simple information system can in fact save lives, and did save lives in this village for sure," says Brewer, who has been working for the past year with residents of the town, which is located south of Chennai.

Funded by a $3 million National Science Foundation grant and generous support from partners Intel, Microsoft, and others, ICT4B team members are returning to Nellavadu and similar villages to erect WiFi antennas that reach distances of 10 to 30 kilometers, providing isolated villagers affordable, easy access to weather conditions for fishermen, crop prices for farmers, health news, and, when possible, warnings of imminent disaster.

To address shortages of doctors in poorer regions, they're also testing a computer program that uses artificial intelligence to diagnose diabetic retinopathy, a common disease in the developing world associated with malnutrition and diabetes. For every hour spent examining photos, a surgeon could instead perform five cataract surgeries. "The hope is that the computer can detect 90 to 95 percent of the cases itself. If we can save surgeons a thousand hours a year in diagnosis time, that's five thousand more people that can see," Brewer explains.

Another longer-term project is focused on affordable, portable, chip-sized sensors that could identify diseases like Dengue Fever in victims without hospital-lab facilities. "Most people don't live near hospitals, so they don't get tested," says Brewer.

Sustainable success is dependant on deploying new, use-based technologies rather than simply applying existing ones. Conditions in developing regions require tools that are low-cost, can run on limited power supplies, and are usable among people with no prior technical experience. To that end a sub-group Brewer founded called Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) is improving such tools as a voice-operated user-interface to help bridge the digital divide for people who can't read or write.

Brewer points out that working with CITRIS has really improved the project's effectiveness. "We're partners in the general vision of better use of technology for society. But in particular, CITRIS is valuable in this context because it's multidisciplinary. CITRIS facilitates mixing social science and technology in a way that traditionally is hard to do," says Brewer.

And while the biggest, most important beneficiaries of ICT4B will be the people living in these poor regions, California will also gain in the form of long-term market development, increased world stability, and continued low-priced imports.

For now, ICT4B is still in the experimental phase--investigating, creating, and testing much-needed solutions, but Brewer is certain the outcome will be good. "It's really hard to know what the killer applications for these groups are, but we have five years, so we'll figure it out," he says.

For more information:

"Berkeley's New Peace Corps for Technology" by David Pescovitz (Forefront, Fall 2004)

CITRIS Project: ICT4B

Eric Brewer's Web site

"Tech Initiatives Aim to go Global" by Don Clark (Wall Street Journal, September 2, 2004)

The barcode of tomorrow, today

Equipping soldiers on the battlefield, keeping store inventory up-to-date, and preventing counterfeit drugs from entering the supply chain: these may sound like three very different problems, but a technology dating back to World War II called RFID (radio frequency identification) could help solve them all by enabling buyers and distributors of goods to automatically track individual items all the way through the supply chain.

So why isn't this technology more common? Nobody could find a way to make the tags affordable enough for everyday use--that is, until Dr. J. Stephen Smith, a CITRIS-affiliated researcher and U.C. Berkeley professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, applied a manufacturing process he'd invented called Fluidic Self-Assembly to RFID production.

RFID tags are the barcodes of tomorrow. Your typical RFID tag is a sticker with a glitter-sized silicon chip and a small, flexible antenna. The chip's integrated circuit is encoded with a unique EPC (electronic product code) before the tag is affixed to a container. Whenever a tag comes within a 10-meter range of an RFID reader, it transmits its code to that reader, which will in turn automatically update the database to reflect the arrival or departure of that object.

Industry and the military have long known the benefits of RFID, which include faster processing of deliveries, better tracking, and a reduction in lost, stolen, and redundant inventory. Because every box of drugs will have a unique, traceable number, RFID provides the Food and Drug Administration with a new means of preventing counterfeit drugs from reaching medicine cabinets. But the high cost of producing the tags prevented widespread use.

The standard manufacturing technique, called Flip-Chip, uses a robotic arm to assemble RFID tags one at time, or about 1,000 per hour. At that rate, tags can be made for 50 cents a piece, too high for lower-cost items.

Enter Fluidic Self-Assembly, a method in which multiple chips are poured into a slurry, then shaken and assembled into a substrate, affixed to plastic, then cut out. In 2002, his Morgan Hill, Calif., company Alien Technology applied FSA, originally invented by Smith to integrate lasers onto silicon, to the manufacture of RFID tags. The results were stunning. With FSA, Alien can currently product 2,000,000 tags per hour for about 20 cents a pop, with the price expected to drop to 5 cents in three years.

Smith's affordable solution comes just in the nick of time. By 2006, the DOD is requiring its 43,000 suppliers to affix RFID tags to all merchandise.

"At any one time the Department of Defense only knows where 60 percent of the stock they have in inventory is. If you think about it that's a pretty bad problem. During the Persian Gulf War they started using RFID systems for huge containers going into the Gulf and found it made a huge difference. Now they want to extend that down to smaller items," says Smith.

Wal-Mart is placing a similar mandate on its vendors. At the same time, the FDA is initiating efforts to have drug manufacturers to apply the tags to boxes of their products as part of an initiative to reduce drug counterfeiting.

If the cost of RFID tags had remained high, this would have amounted to a huge economic burden to manufacturers around the world. As Smith points out, "at 50 cents apiece, it may not have been feasible for a lot of companies to take advantage of this technology, but at 5 cents it's practically guaranteed."

Anticipating a boost in demand, Smith has taken a leave of absence from U.C. Berkeley to serve as CTO of Alien Technologies, rejoining his former graduate students Mark Hadley and Jay Tu. In December, Red Herring magazine named Alien as one of its Top 100 Innovative Companies.