Services Science and Technology: CITRIS Projects

The mission of the Social Entrepreneur Center is to promote the use of technology for social issues by creating sustainable enterprises. This will be achieved by

(i) creating an undergraduate major (and minors linked to existing majors) in social entrepreneurship well integrated with information and technology education,

(ii) fostering an internship program where students can add value to a company, an NGO (non-governmental organization), or a non-profit organization within US or in a foreign country by leveraging technology,

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

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.

Our critical infrastructures continue to be vulnerable to cyber attack, and the nation is at risk from the convergence of cyber attack and more traditional terrorist activities. As the Internet has become pervasive and all of our critical infrastructures inextricably tied to information systems, we are increasingly at risk for economic, social and physical disruption through the rampant insecurities of information systems today. The urgent application of cyber defense technologies is required in order to adequately protect the nation's information infrastructures.

The University of California at Berkeley has been given a grant to design,prototype, implement and evaluate a new search system for bioscience literature. There are significant components of the project that deal with processing of language as it is naturally spoken or written, the design of the search screen and how it works, as well as basic database design and implementation.

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.

The proposal contains four major computational themes, which are linked in various ways.

Quantum Computation: a study of novel quantum algorithms, of entanglement as a computational resource, and of connections to fundamental issues in quantum physics, such as the transition from classical to quantum.

Modeling the Regulatory Processes of the Cell: in the post-genomic era, the computational modeling of the operation of an entire cell at the level of interactions among genes, proteins and environmental conditions.

Standard setting was rarely practiced so extensively as it has been in cyberspace so far. Acknowledging this unique regulative technique, the Clinton administration originally had made "industry self-regulation" its guiding principle for standardizing the net. So far, this principle has not been changed by the succeeding administration. This paper is a historical and conceptual critical assessment of that standardzation policy, examined through the prism of comparative institutional theory.

The Berkeley UPC Team will collaborate with Etnus to build a debugger for the Berkeley UPC Compiler. UPC is a parallel language that uses an explicitly parallel global address space programming model. Commercial implementations of UPC exist for some machines based on compilers that generate native code for a particular architecture. To enable ubiquitous access to the UPC language, the Berkeley UPC Team has developed a prototype UPC compiler that is designed for maximum portability.

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.

Task 1: Next Generation Network Architecture and Protocol Studies
Berkeley team, together with Davis team, will design next generation network architectures and protocols, and conduct comparative simulation studies on the designed protocols and architectures in terms of performance, robustness, and scalability. The studies will pay special attention to performance and robustness across heterogeneous networks (optical, wireline, wireless mobile layers) supporting emerging new services (realtime video applications, multimedia, and high-capacity data exchange).

The Internet is one of the great technology success stories of the twentieth century, enabling greater access to information and provided new modes of communication among people and organizations. Unfortunately, the Internet's very success is now creating obstacles to innovation in the networking technology that lies at its core. The size and scope of the public Internet now make the introduction and deployment of new network services very difficult.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have the potential to benefit society in a myriad of ways, such as accelerating scientific research, increasing productivity, and enhancing security. WSNs also pose many fascinating scientific challenges, ranging from device physics to encoding techniques to distributed algorithms. There is a large, diverse, and rapidly increasing network literature in this area. Unfortunately, much of this work has been done in isolation; all too often individual components are crafted and evaluated without an overall vision or a context for deployment.

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.

What is commonly considered the World Wide Web is in fact a small fraction of the actual data available on the Internet. The metaphor of a web was motivated by linked textual material, but the volume of hypertext on the Internet is dwarfed by the amount of information made available in networked databases provided by directory services, information portals, government agencies, private companies, scientists, and a host of other providers.

What is commonly considered the World Wide Web is a small fraction of the data available on the Internet. The volume of hypertext accessible to conventional search engines is 400 to 550 times smaller than the 7.5 petabytes of networked databases from directory services, information portals, scientists, government agencies and other providers. Our goal is to explore the mechanisms for and consequences of aggressively leveraging this underutilized resource.

Our practice of disseminating, accessing and using information, especially scholarly information, is still significantly impeded by the legacy of pre-electronic media. While overcoming these impediments will require many elements, there are opportunities for technological innovation to support new and better practices. For example, journals exist in their traditional forms at least partly because of the value of the peer review process, which thus far has not yielded to decentralized, distributed, and timely mechanisms of the Web.

SMETE.ORG agrees to work with MERLOT to meet the objectives outlined in the proposal "The NSDL Collaboration Finder: Connecting Projects for Effective and Efficient NSDL Development." NSDL means National Science Digital Library.

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.

The Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) and the educational arm of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley will test a number of models that might prove effective in applying technological solutions to problems of higher educational quality, cost, and access within the context of a major public research university.

In collaboration with Microsoft, we have begun the TeleEducation/TeleCollaboration and Streaming Media project, which includes network protocols (including floor-control), multicasting, support for caching, and streaming media. These require extensive technology development beyond the current Internet, to effectively and affordably support quality real-time streaming media, dynamic

We propose a theory/experiment collaboration that will work towards reliable, scalable quantum information processing. Theory and experiment will be connected and interleaved at several levels. On the theory side, we will study issues concerned with the underlying information technology, and issues that arise when quantum information theory is applied to real physical systems, especially to gas phase systems using atoms and light fields. On the experimental side, we will develop scalable quantum component technology based on gas phase systems using atoms and light fields.

We define a "collaborative telerobot" as a telerobot simultaneously controlled by many participants, where input from each participant is combined to generate a single control stream.Collaborative Telerobotics (CT) is a highly innovative approach to teleimmersion and teleworking. With CT, participants collaborate rather than compete for access to valuable resources such as historical and scientific sites. A scalable infrastructure for CT, compatible with the Internet, would allow large groups of students or researchers to simultaneously

Collaboration and information-sharing are among the most important applications of computing. Privacy is a basic human need.

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

Model checking has become a successful verification technology for hardware, because it permits the fully automatic analysis of designs. For software verification, model checkers must be applied to finite abstractions of code. This requires suitable abstractions: if the abstraction is too coarse, the model checker fails to prove the desired property; if it is too fine, the model checker fails to terminate.