Energy and the Environment: CITRIS Projects

Today’s computing has been a great success. Healthcare, financial, communication, and entertainment industries rely heavily on data centers. By some estimates, the amount of data processed in data centers is doubling every year. At this pace, there will be needs for many ultrahigh-performance data centers processing 1000 times more data in the next decade. However, today’s data centers

Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) is an electric-powered autonomous transportation system that closely follows the car architecture and avoids the pitfalls of bus and rail mass transit without requiring fuel cells or advanced battery technology. Lightweight 2-4 passenger vehicles run along an elevated guideway that can be built over existing roads with traffic managed by a control system similar to packet routing (with non-destructive arbitration) over the internet.

SIMI is a proof-of-feasibility project that combines state-of-the-art satellite and radar data image processing with real-time data from ground solar stations in order to determine solar energy availability

Because electricity cannot be practically or economically stored in large quantities, the electricity generation and distribution system must match supply and demand on a minute-by-minute basis. Delivery of electricity for residential use has traditionally been done by matching the supply to the demand, with little or no control over the demand. This causes severe distortions in the system operation and economics when the demand hits unusually high peak values. When these peaks

Pollution due to atmospheric particulates is a major cause of respiratory illnesses such as asthma particularly in California’s Central Valley which contains five of the ten most polluted cities in the United States. Real-time monitoring of the size and density of airborne particles is important for providing health advisories. Traditional monitoring techniques provide only sparse, localized measurements. This proposal seeks seed funding to investigate terrestrial remote sensing as a novel low-cost wide-coverage alternate to current approaches for monitoring atmospheric particulates.

PlanetLab is an open, globally distributed testbed for developing, deploying and accessing planetary-scale network services. There are currently more than 220 machines at 100 sites world-wide available to support both short-term experiments and long-running network services.

This research addresses some important components in the theoretical and algorithmic signal processing machinery needed to make low-power, ubiquitous sensor networks a reality. The physical and hardware attributes as well as the computing and communication capabilities of these low-power, low-cost sensors, particularly those based on high-density low-cost MEMS devices, have the potential to revolutionize next-generation information technology.

Anyone who has ever sat near a cold window on a winter day or in direct sunlight on a hot day recognizes that windows can cause thermal discomfort. In spite of this broad recognition there is no straightforward method to quantify the extent of such discomfort. HVAC designers specify dedicated perimeter heating and cooling systems to mitigate window-related comfort problems, yet they use simplified assumptions that may not solve the comfort problems or that might lead to designs that are energy-inefficient.

PrIMe is a community activity aimed at the development of predictive reaction models for combustion. The primary motivation is to establish and demonstrate the community approach to kinetic-model development and, perhaps most importantly, establish a means for reaching community consensus on the models and data.
The initial objective is the creation of the PrIMe Data Warehouse.
The membership in PrIMe is open to all qualified individuals.

Current Research
Fast, automated generation of photo realistic 3D models of city environments for the purpose of simulations and interactive walk-, drive-, or fly-thrus. This goal requires the combination of techniques from various research areas.
Airborne Modeling
Generation of 3D models of rooftops and terrain shape from airborne laser scans and photos.
- Processing airborne laser scans
- Reconstructing surface geometry
- Texture mapping
Ground-Based Modeling
Generation of 3D models of facades and street scenery as seen from street level.
It involves in particular:

Many software security issues cannot be addressed without a specification defining what security means. This project investigates secure API's and disciplined styles of programming that reduce the likelihood of security flaws and combines two related efforts: first, development of specification languages that enhance security without much cost to programmers, and second, tools that enforce these disciplines, such as the efficient insertion of security monitors into existing programs.

The Center for the Built Environment (CBE) at UC Berkeley has developed a sophisticated thermal comfort capable of modeling non-uniform, transient conditions. This model has been used to study occupant comfort in buildings and automobiles. 3M is interested in analyzing the impacts of 3M Solar Reflecting Film (SRF) on automobile occupant comfort. SRF has unique properties that reduce transmitted solar heat gain and lower the glass surface temperature. CBE will develop a model that predicts the behavior of SRF and incorporate that model into its automotive thermal comfort model.

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 research efforts of the RUBINET Group focus on designing network infrastructures that are robust, secure, efficient, and support ubiquitous (mobile) computing. With the rapid technology advancement in wireless sensors, specialized hand-held devices, and smart appliances, the future network infrastructure has to be flexible enough to connect these heterogeneous end nodes over different networks, from the conventional wide-area Internet to wireless and satellite links.

To meet the objectives of the California Energy Commission (CEC) to create inexpensive and "smart" thermostats and electricity meters that could be installed in all residences in California to help conserve energy via demand-response "real-time" electricity pricing, we will combine CITRIS efforts in BSAC (Picoradio), BSAC(Smart Dust) and TinyOS (NEST) to meet the following goals:
>> Cost targets of $30 for the thermostat, $10 for the temperature node, and $50 for the electricity meter

The PicoRadio project strives to develop the range of technologies necessary for the realization of ultralow energy wireless sensor networks. These include the study of multi-hop networks, and media-access layers that support low variable-rate data transmission while ensuring energy-consumption levels that are close to the theoretical limits. The target is to create a node that consumes 50-100 uW to operate. This power consumption would allow it to power itself from the energy sources of the operating environment.

The networked sensor regime is an exciting new design space that is emerging as a result of innovations in RF Communication technology and MEMS technology. TinyOS explores the software support that is required in that design space. TinyOS is a component-based runtime environment designed to provide support for deeply embedded systems, which require concurrency intensive operations while constrained by minimal hardware resources. For example, originally designed for the Smart Dust hardware platform, our scheduler fits in under 200 bytes of program memory.

We are developing theories, software, and computational tools for the hierarchical modeling of distributed hybrid and embedded systems by providing technologies for their composable specification, analysis, simulation, and synthesis.
We shall help survey the state-of-the-art in hybrid and embedded system technology. The Berkeley contribution to the report will focus on established research projects and major industrial R&D and standardization efforts. Specifically included in this survey will be the SystemC initiative (www.systemc.org) and other component-based

An Interactive Sensor Networks (ISN) is a distributed sensor and communication system where two things obtain: Some data processing is done at the sensor node location before being sent to the main processing location; and, the processing done at the sensor node location is configurable by the specific user in real time, to save system resources as well as make the output the user receives more friendly. Work performed in this project will consist of designing interactive sensor nodes, building the nodes, setting up a distributed system, and characterizing and testing.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is sponsoring a program for Nano Mechanical Array Signal Processors (NMASP). The key focus of this program is on optimized combinations of innovative solutions in micro or nano fabrication, materials processing, device design, transduction mechanism, interconnects, and other relevant engineering approaches that directly address the performance issues in high-Q UHF mechanical resonator arrays for RF transceiver and signal processor applications.

There has been intensive research focused on the development of an electronic replacement for the ubiquitous UPC barcode. To replace consumer barcodes, ultra-low cost will be paramount. Organic based circuits may enable this due to their low fabrication cost. In this work, the investigators will develop the technologies necessary for RFID barcode replacement systems, and will use these to demonstrate a major subcomponent of any RFID system - the power harvesting subcircuit.