Center for Information Technology Research

Center for Information Technology Research

in the Interest of Society

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

¾ Margaret Mead

Contents

CITRIS Mission………………………………………………………. 3

2001/02 Highlights…………………………………………………… 5

Technologies for Societal Scale Information Systems…………… 8

Delivering Service to Society……………………………………… 12

Outreach and Education……………………………………………… 16

Funding Successes ……………………………………………………19

Construction Planning and Space…………………………………. 20

Network of Centers…………………………………………………… 21

New Faculty…………………………………………………………… 23

CITRIS In the News ¾ Press Clippings…………………………… 24

CITRIS Mission

The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society was established to sponsor and house collaborative information technology research to provide solutions to grand-challenge social and commercial problems affecting the quality of life of individuals and organizations.

CITRIS is designing Societal Scale Information Systems (SISs) to collect, understand and help people with the vast quantities of information needed to address these problems. SISs will integrate vast numbers of tiny wireless sensors, hand-help information devices and large computing clusters into systems that are easy for all citizens to use to save energy, use transportation more efficiently, ensure safety in emergencies, care for the health of their families, care for and better use the environment and enhance their educations.

The initial set of CITRIS applications include the following:

· Energy Efficiency. A network of tiny, inexpensive sensors are making buildings vastly more energy efficient, and will save as much as $55 billion in energy costs nationally and 35 million tons of carbon emissions annually.

· Transportation: Linking sensors in California’s roadways to computers to analyze traffic flow could point commuters to efficient routes and help Caltrans and planners make solid transit decisions. Optimizing traffic could save Californians up to $15 billion a year in wages, $600 million in trucking costs and 37 million gallons of fuel.

· Seismic Safety: A major earthquake in the Bay area could cost 10,000 lives, $200 billion in damages and untold lost productivity. Real-time information on the conditions of buildings, bridges and lifeline networks is key to reducing risk. A vast system to deliver reliable, personalized information in minutes to emergency teams would save lives.

· Education: High-tech classrooms for distance learning can serve more students in California’s growing universities, schools and businesses. CITRIS technology will deliver the undergraduate program in information technology to UC Merced in the heart of California, a critical addition to state growth in education and industry.

· Health Care: As many as 60,000 fatal heart attacks ¾20% of cardiac deaths¾could be prevented each year if at-risk people wore sensors now being developed to detect trouble and alert medics. Other medical monitoring devices would follow, including help for military personnel and others in remote areas.

· Environment: From Monterey Bay to urban Southern California, CITRIS projects will help guard California’s waters, air and environment. New information technologies may also be adapted later for more productive agriculture.

Highlights 2001/2002

February and March, 2001

Stories about CITRIS begin appearing in the press. (See attached Press Clippings)

May 22, 2001

CITRIS researchers unveil “smart” sensor technologies that can cut the state’s electricity bill by up to $7 billion a year. UC Berkeley invited members of the press to see researchers demonstrate solar and battery-powered "smart dust motes" that had been installed in portions of Cory Hall.

July 27, 2001

CITRIS receives initial funds of $20 million in 2001-2002 state budget. In addition, Corporate and private donors have pledged more than $170 million for CITRIS. As of February 2002 over $60 million has been awarded in federal research grants.

August 2001

UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering launches a monthly online research digest Lab Notes (www.coe.berkeley.edu/labnotes/index.html) that highlights CITRIS research.

September 11, 2001

CITRIS researchers immediately create a Web site to help the public find out about the safety of loved ones affected by the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. The site was powered by "Millennium" - a cluster of 1,000 processors that are networked together. The computers, donated by private industry, handled up to 100 Web queries per second. Stories about Millennium site appeared in the local and national newspapers and TV stations, including ABC News.

September 25, 2001

CITRIS receives a five-year, $7.5 million grant as part of the Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative of the National Science Foundation. The UC Berkeley-led initiative was one of the largest ITR awards granted nationwide. The grant will support work in energy efficiency and disaster preparedness, as well as underlying computer science.

October 1, 2001

CITRIS announces a joint venture between UC Berkeley and UC Merced to make the content of UC Berkeley lower-division computer science courses available online for the first time.

October 4, 2001

UC Berkeley announces Ruzena Bajcsy as new director of CITRIS. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine and professor of robotics at the University of Pennsylvania, she was most recently Associate Director of Computer Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the National Science Foundation.

November 11, 2001

Intel Corp. opened the Intel Research Laboratory at UC Berkeley. The new lab will focus on the development of the company's future vision of computing, dubbed "proactive computing." One example of this concept is called the "Ad Hoc Network" project. The project involves the concept of end users carrying a tiny computer system, dubbed a "mote." Each '"mote" is linked to a network, which collects and gathers information to a main system. The "Ad Hoc Network" technology could lead to several applications, such as digital firefighters. It could also lead to the development of far-out medical products like digital socks or bandages. The Intel Laboratory will be available to all CITRIS researchers.

December 21, 2001

Media attend an earthquake shake test of a 3-story apartment building. Fifty remote sensors developed by CITRIS researchers were positioned at key structural points along the building while it was subjected to a recreated Northridge earthquake at the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center at the Richmond Field Station. The sensors provided key information about the building’s structural integrity after a major earthquake. Reporters from Business 2.0, Tech TV, and other local stations covered the sensor technology.

December 2001

In collaboration with Japanese colleagues, CITRIS researchers instrumented a section of Tokachi Port in Hokkaido, Japan with underground and surface wireless acceleration sensors to measure its response to a simulated earthquake caused by underground explosions.

January 2002

Launch of weekly CITRIS seminar series for students and faculty to educate each other about the broad agenda of CITRIS.

January 28,2002

Former President Clinton spoke to a full-house on January 28 in Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. He praised the university’s efforts regarding CITRIS

“I admire this school very much for the remarkable contributions you have made to America and to California…particularly the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society here…”, said Clinton.

Governor Gray Davis, on hand for the afternoon speech, also commended Berkeley’s pioneering research and its role in two of the four new UC-based centers for science and innovation — CITRIS, based at Berkeley, and QB3, a center for bioengineering.

These initiatives, he said, are emblematic of California’s continuing success at staying at the forefront of the Internet and biotechnology revolution.

February 5, 2002

CITRIS Researchers ship 1000 “Smart Dust Motes” for sensor net research to over a dozen academic and industrial research groups around the country, and have a workshop to train these groups in their programming and use. CITRIS technology forms the basis of research in sensor nets nationwide.

February 15, 2002

The Berkeley Institute of Design (BID) has its inaugural meeting. BID brings together faculty from Engineering, Business, the School for Information Management and Systems, the Center for Design Visualization, Environmental Design and Art Practice to study common principles of designing products that best suit peoples’ needs, from software to physical artifacts to physical spaces. BID will be organized as a new degree granting interdepartmental group.

Technologies for Societal Scale Information Systems

At the core of the Societal Scale Information Systems that CITRIS is building are vast numbers of tiny sensors networked together wirelessly that can sense the world around them, and communicate this information. Core activities include

Making these sensors so small and cheap that they can be deployed in vast numbers anywhere
Creating the software that lets these sensors communicate with one another in an adverse environment and perform useful tasks, such as measuring acceleration in structures during earthquakes, power, light, temperature, chemicals and biological agents in a Smart Building, medical conditions of patients, locations of vehicles in a transportation network, and pollution constituents in the environment
Transferring this technology to other research groups in academia and industry.

1. Smart Dust: Sensors and Communicators get Smaller and Smaller

CITRIS-developed “Smart Dust”, also known as “Motes”¾ tiny, inexpensive electronic sensors that are outfitted with wireless radio transceivers and their own “TinyOS” operating system ¾ are growing even smaller. The pictures below show a sequence of sensors through 3 generations of miniaturization. Initially powered by outboard batteries, Smart Dust will be able to extract enough energy to operate directly from its environment (vibrations, temperature changes, and ambient light).

February 2000 February 2001 February 2002

2. Creating networks of wireless sensors

On a Small-Scale

On March 2001, at the 29 Palms Marine Base in the Mojave Desert, 10 Motes wrapped in styrofoam were dropped from an airplane, landed, formed a wireless network with one another, used magnetic sensors to detect and locate passing vehicles, and radioed that information back to a passing airplane.

On a Larger Scale

800 motes were handed out to the audience attending the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco on Feb. 28.This is Intel’s premier conference held annually to showcase new technology for their application development community. As the Motes were handed around by the audience, they

communicated with one another and the speaker on the podium. The above image shows the topology of a self-organized network of 100 of these nodes in the Moscone Center. The design of the hardware, the operating system and the network algorithms represent a collaboration between UC Berkeley, Intel Research @ Berkeley and Intel Labs in Oregon.

3. Sharing this technology with the leading research groups in the country

CITRIS has been selected by DARPA ITO (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Information Technology Office) as the primary provider of sensor network technology to all its research groups in sensor nets and “ubiquitous computing”. The DARPA NEST (Network Embedded Software Technology) Program funds CITRIS researchers to design Motes, to produce the software that runs on them, to have them manufactured for other research groups, and to educate other groups in their use. In other words, the leading research groups in the country use CITRIS technology for their research in this area.

On Feb 5, CITRIS delivered 1000 Motes to research projects across the country at the following institutions and held an 8-hour programming tutorial:

Academic Institutions / Companies
· UCB
· UCSD
· UCLA
· USC
· MIT
· Rutgers
· Dartmouth
· University Illinois- Urbana
Champaign
· NCSA
· University of Virginia
· University of Washington
· Ohio State / · Intel
· Crossbow
· Bosch
· Accenture
· Mitre
· Xerox PARC
· Kestrel
Government
· NCSC
· Wright Patterson AFB

Commercial Spin Offs

Crossbow has announced a commercial product based on our Motes. A prototype of this product was used in the seismic experiments described in the next section. The Crossbow CN4000 Series Wireless Seismic Recorder and Sensor encompass a turn-key system for seismic data acquisition on structures. It features data collection capability for both local and global response analysis of large structures. Example applications include data collection on bridges, dams, and buildings. The system consists of wireless accelerometers, as well as other sensors and accessories. The system is easy to set up and configure and the proprietary RF technology supports a several square mile coverage range thru a multi-hop radio technology.

4. Software for Societal Scale Information Systems: Millennium Clusters

Collecting vast amounts of data from sensor networks is not enough: we need to collect, process and understand it. One technology to support this need is “cluster computing,” where many smaller conventional computers cooperate to solve a much larger problem. Millennium is a UCB-campus-wide cluster of computing clusters that provides deep computing and storage resources for CITRIS, and is a prototype for the large decentralized computing facility that many SISs will use.

As an illustration of its use in disaster recovery, CITRIS developed a website in the evening of September 11 to help people locate loved ones. It received millions of hits shortly after deployment, and was widely mentioned in the press.

Millennium system software is very widely used for cluster computing outside CITRIS, and is redistributed by NPACI at UCSD. Millennium processor hardware was donated by CITRIS Founding Corporate Member (FCM) Intel, with FCMs IBM, Microsoft, Nortel and Sun making substantial contributions. The cluster is expected to be upgraded in the near future.

Delivering Service to Society

Using Motes to Make Buildings Seismically Safer

In collaboration with CalTech, CITRIS researchers simulated the Northridge earthquake by placing a three-story apartment building on a large “shaking table” at the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Center at Richmond Field Station and shaking it using recorded data from the Northridge quake. A number of such buildings collapsed or nearly collapsed during the actual quake. The purpose of this test was to measure the actual force in these buildings and study ways of reinforcing them.

A steel frame used to retrofit the building helped minimize twisting motions, while finish materials — including the stucco exterior and gypsum board — helped minimize the building's lateral movements during the quake.

Using Motes to Study How Earthquakes Cause Soil to Fail