Introduction from the Director

CITRIS: An Informal and Personal Introduction from the Director

1. Our history. The Center for Information Technology in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) was established in 2001 by the State of California. Its headquarters building is on the UC Berkeley campus, and CITRIS activity at Berkeley is administered by the Dado & Maria Banatao Institute@CITRIS Berkeley. CITRIS also has buildings or innovation centers at UC Davis, UC Merced, and UC Santa Cruz.  Its mission is to “shorten the pipeline” between the world-class laboratory research of the University of California and the creation of start-ups, businesses, and indeed whole industries. For example, ten years ago the general field of ‘smart dust’ was invented at the University of California. The research vision was to design and prototype miniaturized computers, about the size of a 25-cent coin, which combined tiny microprocessors with radios and sensors. CITRIS asked researchers all over our 4 campuses “if you had limitless computing, communication and sensing, how would that stimulate your research.”? Soon, these wireless sensor networks were being used by architects to build energy efficiency systems in ‘smart buildings; ’ by biologists to track the mating habits of wildlife; by botanists to monitor the growth of redwood trees; by civil engineers to study the water patterns in the Sierras; and by mechanical engineers to track fire-fighters in buildings. Beyond this academic success, by 2005, several commercial companies were launched or ‘spun-off’ including Dust Networks, Arch Rock and Sentilla. It was the ecosystem of CITRIS on the four campuses that showed these companies how to create market growth in fields as diverse as architecture, oil-refining, and biology. Without CITRIS it would not have been as easy to create such companies merely from a ‘tech-push’ viewpoint. CITRIS identified the ‘societal pull’ and the first and most sustainable market opportunities – the head-bowling pins in the words of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

2. Related Centers. The State of California formed CITRIS and three other such Institutes approximately ten years ago. Officially they are called the Governor Gray Davis Institutes for Science and Innovation. The other three are – the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) dedicated to integrating our understanding of biological systems at all levels of complexity; CalIT2 which focuses its work in the context of telecommunications and information technology as related to the evolving Internet; and CNSI which focuses on new nanotechnology systems. They all have a similar mission: to build multi-disciplinary research teams that address large-scale societal problems. Other countries have models similar to CITRIS in which academia works with industry to accelerate innovation. They include the well-known Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany, and the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA). Other US States have innovative collaboration centers and we refer the reader to the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh PA.

3. Culture. So what is the real magic – or the unique feature of CITRIS? Often we use the word ‘embedding’ to explain our day-to-day culture. First, the headquarters building on the Berkeley campus (Sutardja Dai Hall) has offices and laboratories not only for engineers but also for professors from law, public policy and art-practice. Second in this multi-disciplinary environment we ‘embed’ - in offices in the building - our colleagues from industry and those who work with state government. All these people – from academia, industry and government - work together to identify key issues and then develop projects from a ‘societal pull’ perspective. CITRIS’s work with the California Energy Commission (CEC) through the Public Interest Energy Research program (PIER) and the California Institute for Energy and the Environment (CIEE) is a good example of this ‘embedding’ philosophy. In 2001 the ‘electricity-crisis’ in California was due to a peak-load problem that we all experience(d) at 4pm on the sweltering summer afternoons. When we all cranked-up our air-conditioners, we created a rush hour on a (not-so) Smart Grid, resulting in brown-outs and black-outs. So, in 2002/3, the CEC/PIER/CIEE organizations approached CITRIS and Lawrence Berkeley Labs to create a multi-disciplinary team of architects, engineers, and user-interface specialists. The research team created a reference design for open system Programmable Communicating Thermostats, related smart sensors, and grid-level IT techniques that could reduce the peak-load consumption behaviors using ‘time-of-use and critical peak pricing.’ Now, in 2010, when time-differentiated prices are delivered to both commercial and residential buildings we, as a State, can modify our behavior at those critical times in order to avoid the brown-out/black-out situations. During the projects, the academic researchers still published many papers and got promoted, and PhD students graduated well and went off to positions at other Universities and industry. Better yet, the CITRIS research output was genuinely useful to the State's energy challenge and to the supporting industries that now build the devices that CITRIS first prototyped.

4. Future. As for the future, we are only at the beginning of stories like this one on energy and the Smart Grid. Miniature, self-powered, communicating sensors are still being developed which have lower and lower costs and which can be used in the Smart Grid’s transmission, distribution and residential cables to monitor current and voltage. They can also monitor the health of underground distribution cables. On a different tack, similar sensors can be developed to monitor water supply. A floating sensor is being prototyped by civil engineers to track water flow in levee breaks. GPS sensors and software are being embedded in cell-phones to improve the 511.org system. Sensors can be used to monitor the health and well-being of elderly people in retirement homes. These sensors can also be connected to the high-speed broadband network of the California Telehealth Network being developed and rolled-out to under-served communities. In summary, CITRIS expects that smart sensors and IT will be the core technologies in solving our societal challenges in areas such as energy, healthcare, and infrastructures. Yet, at the same time, it is the early collaboration between academia, industry and government that can address the precise problem that needs to be studied in the interest of society – hence CITRIS!

Paul Wright; and many colleagues across our four campuses and at UCOP

November 2009