February '06 Newsletter

When your campus is being built up all around you, just getting to class on time can be a challenge. "We're pretty much a construction site, so it's difficult to do normal university business," says Jeff Wright, dean of UC Merced's School of Engineering.

But it's the chance to not do business as usual that's already brought 55 new faculty, 1000 students, and industry partners like Honeywell and United Technologies to the University of California's 10th campus. Surveying the bulldozers and hard-hat only areas, they see opportunities to pioneer new lines of research and redesign the way programs are structured to motivate interaction between disciplines. Even the new buildings and the bucolic 2,000 acres they're sitting on double as "living laboratories" for innovative environmental sensor network and energy research. With Yosemite National Park just 75 miles away, the view's not too shabby, either.

If completing a successful first semester this December weren't enough,  earlier in the year the CITRIS campus partnered with Stanford and the California Institute of Technology to establish the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems (COINS), which will develop microscopic machines. School of Engineering freshmen enrolled in a brand-new, Java-based introduction to computing sequence (CSE 20 and 21), which was designed in close collaboration with UC Berkeley and CITRIS. The Kolligian library, where most classes are being held is near completion, with laboratory courses and research taking place temporarily at Castle Air Force base, just a quick 7-mile shuttle ride away.

Wright says the School of Engineering will add nine new faculty to its existing 15 this year and grow at that rate for the next six years. Each hire brings a research agenda that will help shape the campus for years to come.

For physicist Raymond Chiao, it was the prospect of pioneering research in gravitational radiation that  inspired his departure from UC Berkeley for a joint faculty position at Merced's nascent Schools of Natural Science and Engineering this fall.

Physicist and solar power expert Roland Winston, who arrived at the campus from the University of Chicago in three years ago, looks forward to having several acres on which to conduct his research into new panels that concentrate solar energy. The chance to build an energy institute in cooperation with a UC-caliber engineering program, something his former campus lacked, was also appealing. Location factored large in Winston's decision as well. "California is probably the most enlightened, advanced state in regards to solar energy, both as a resource and in terms of policy," he says.

Because it's so new, one thing UC Merced doesn't have is rigid departmental structures. "We think departments interfere with cross-disciplinary synergy. At established campuses it's relatively more difficult to work across departmental boundaries. So the way we hire faculty is to develop very strong graduate groups where the faculty are drawn from multiple Schools," explains Wright.

It's a way of doing work that United Technologies Research Fellow Mike Sahm believes better reflects the reality of how teams are formed in research and business environments. "This is how we work in research and business environments. We form integrated product teams that include all disciplines you need from early concept to dealing with the warrantee. We think this new way of structuring departments will better prepare students for the real world," says Sahm.

Incoming faculty, too, are looking forward to increased departmental freedom. "You can build programs and structure them to the greatest extent possible, according to your own vision, which is not possible at a mature campus," says Winston.

Physical infrastructure, or lack thereof, is also providing a chance to try something different. New buildings won't just host classrooms, laboratories, and meeting areas. They will double as "living laboratories."

"UC Merced's campus will be a test bed, where we'll have state of the art sensor technology throughout the buildings, so we can monitor things like building condition, climate, environmental impact, energy consumption. So it will be a living laboratory both for conducting research but also for educating students about the environment and sustainability," explains Wright. “We anticipate this research growing to a fertile area of growth for CITRIS innovation.”

The opportunity for new academic-private sector partnerships leveraging this model is consistent with the CITRIS mandate and vision. “Our living laboratory will support academic research and education on one hand, and on the other, accelerate the rate at which these exciting new technologies will find markets,” says Wright.

CITRIS industrial partners agree. "At the research center, we're looking at the integration of conventional and separate systems, how do you put these together and make a building center that works better. As UC Merced's buildings go up, it's a chance to put these new technologies to use," says Sahm.

But first things first. With the second semester now underway, there are still faculty to hire, buildings to construct, and students to instruct. "Our day job is building a university. Everything else is happening alongside that," says Wright.

For more information:

UC Merced's Web Site

Renowned Berkeley Physicist Raymond Chiao to Join UC Merced Faculty
(UC Merced News, Dec 15, 2005)

Premier Physicist to Create World-Class Renewable Energy Program at UC Merced
(UC Merced News, April 22, 2003)

Merced Uniquely Offers Freedom to Experiment
by Charlotte Hsu (Daily Bruin)

UC Merced School of Engineering Participates in COINS Nanomechanical Research Center
(UC Merced News, March 29, 2005)

It  now accounts for 75 percent of the workforce in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 50 percent in Brazil, German, Japan, and Russia, according to IBM Research. Yet there are only a few academic courses and very little research devoted to it. It's called services, and many believe it's going to be the next big thing in education and academic research. Some are even predicting that what IBM calls Services Sciences Management and Engineering (SSME) could eventually develop into an entirely new discipline.

"Changes in the nature of the economy and business are requiring something different about how we train engineers and consultants. The economy is shifting from manufacturing products towards information services, yet there's no intellectual focus around this problem, no coherent foundation for what services are as a whole," explains Bob Glushko, an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley's the School of Information and Management Systems (SIMS) and co-author of the new book "Document Engineering: Analyzing and Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services."

To address that lack, professors and administrators at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz are developing curriculum and research agendas focused on services. With its emphasis on its multidisciplinary research and history of collaborating with government and industry, CITRIS is taking a leading role to, in Glushko's words, "bring some there there to this issue of services."

To that end, CITRIS is launching a Service Science, Management and Engineering certificate program for UC Berkeley graduate students at the Haas School of Business, the College of Engineering, and SIMS. An executive director for the program will be announced soon. On January 23, CITRIS hosted a luncheon at the Faculty Club to honor Corporate Founding Member IBM's support of the new program. This spring, UC Berkeley will graduate it's first student in Operations Research and Management Science, a services-oriented major developed by Industrial Engineering and Operations Research professor Rhonda Righter.

These recent events exemplify what Thomas Kalil, UC Berkeley's Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and Technology, describes as the university's three-prong strategy to address services: 1) educating students in the new discipline; 2) using Berkeley as a test bed for innovative new approaches to services; and 3) conducting academic research in the emerging field.

One of the first and most challenging tasks at hand, however, is defining exactly what is meant by "services." As an academic discipline, services is brand new; questions outnumber answers.

"Looking at services is akin to the blind man looking at the elephant. We know it's there. We know it's big. But we're not exactly sure where it is or even which way it's going," says Professor Patrick Mantey, Founding Dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering and Affiliate Director of CITRIS.

Because services are produced and consumed simultaneously, they are difficult in many cases to quantify. Also challenging is the fact that "services" has, traditionally, served as a catch-all term for jobs that don't fall into manufacturing or agriculture. But as Righter points out, "take those out and it's still a huge world. So we have to figure what unifies services."

A must-read presentation by Paul Maglio, senior manager of service systems research, and Jim Spohrer, director of services research, both at  IBM Almaden Research Center, attempts to narrow the focus. In it, they define service science in two ways: "the application of scientific, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another" and "the study of service systems." Though Maglio acknowledges, "a whole lot of people have different spins on this. 'Services is anything of value you can't drop on your foot' is the glib version."

With services now comprising half of IBM's revenue, however, the company is anything but glib. It is spearheading the effort to get top-tier research universities, government decision-makers, and industry leaders from around the world excited about services. This industry-side push combined with the newness and multidisciplinary nature of the field are causing some to liken it to the emergence of computer science more than half a century ago.

"When computers were getting going in the '40s and '50s, there was no such thing as computer science. In some schools it was part of math, in others it was part of engineering and in others, part of physics. It was balkanized," says Henry Chesbrough, adjunct professor and executive director of the Center for Open Innovation at Haas.

The solution was to bring the disciplines together under one roof. Today computer science departments are commonplace. Likewise, professors such as Chesbrough and others cited in this article are scouring courses in other disciplines for  "services" modules they can incorporate into a core graduate course, titled "The Future of Services: Business Models for Services Innovation."

"It's really trying to bring together the different strings of the different schools and find some common ground intellectually," says Glushko, who is helping develop Berkeley's services curriculum.

IBM, too, is working on a 12-module course, part of which is already available for free through its SSME Web site. 

Educating students is a priority because in many departments students only study their own discipline, leaving them without the full range of knowledge they'll actually need to possess in the services-driven labor market.

"We educated people in EECS for years with very little knowledge of how the enterprise really operates. They learned it when they got there. But what companies are now saying is if you're going to go into the services business, you have to hit the ground running," says Mantey.

To better prepare its engineers for the realities they'll face after school, UC Santa Cruz will soon offer a new services-oriented engineering graduate program called Technology and Information Management.

If these courses and degree programs are to be truly useful, industry input is essential. After all, it's the companies who are doing services that have the most experience to offer. It's no surprise that the professors who are championing services often come from outside academia. Both Glushko and Chesbrough are adjunct professors whose expertise stems from decades of experience in the business world. In addition to experts, companies like IBM also possess much-needed case studies for students to chew on, as well as data for researchers to study.

"What we IBM bring to the table is specific business problems, obviously,  but also what you might call the Fort Knox of services data. We've got a lot of it around here. What academia brings to us is this broad capability of asking the right questions of these systems, unlocking our data, and helping us to work across disciplines in ways we can't necessarily imagine doing at the outset. It's a process we have to go through together," says Maglio.

The case studies and data won't just come from industry. Glushko and a team of graduate students are looking at ways to improve and innovate services on the campus itself. Kalil believes such efforts will turn the UC Berkeley campus into a "living laboratory" for services research.

"It's about building on initiatives like eBerkeley"--which applied Web technology to improve campus operations--"and getting students involved in developing new Web services for Berkeley as a way of making the campus more efficient and user friendly, not only adding technology but looking at  core business processes on campus and whether some need to be improved," says Kalil.

Important services research will also come out of CITRIS's newly formed Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed systems Laboratory (RAD Lab). The lab will apply technology and multidisciplinary research to enable individuals, rather than entire teams of people, to create new Web-based services.

Behind all of these efforts is a strong sense of urgency.

"So much of our economy today is built on services, yet if you look at what we actually understand to innovate in services, it's meager. It's a dangerous situation for our economy and way of life," warns Chesbrough.

Although in many ways universities have been behind the curve when it comes to services, with industry's help, they can be brought up to speed. As Chesbrough points out, it's a state of affairs that's not without precedent:  "Computer science could have been a very unconnected field. What brought it together was not the government or particular actions of a university, but industry. Services also are too important to allow this balkanization to continue. Industry will bring us together so we can work in a more coordinated way to deal with it."

For more information:

IBM Research SSME page

"Emergence of Service Science: Services Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME) as the Next Frontier in Innovation"
by Jim Spohrer and Paul Maglio (PowerPoint presentation, October 25, 2005)

Henry Chesbrough's Home Page

Robert Glushko's Home Page

Rhonda Righter's Home Page

Patrick Mantey's Home Page

eBerkeley

Document Engineering

"New Lab for DIY Web Services"
by David Pescovitz (Lab notes, January 2006)

"Coming to a college near you: Services science?"
by Robert McMillan (IDG News Service, October 08, 2004)

"Top Universities Offer Tech-Management Courses Developed By IBM"
by Paul McDougall (InformationWeek, May 24, 2005)