CITRIS
Center For Information Technology Research In
The Interest Of Society
James Demmel
EECS and Mathematics Depts.
University of California at Berkeley
demmel@cs.berkeley.edu
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.”
–Margaret Mead
 Major new initiative within the College of Engineering and on the
Berkeley Campus
 Joint with UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, UC Merced
 Over 90 faculty from 21 departments
 Many industrial partners
 CITRIS will focus on IT solutions to tough, quality-of-life related
problems
The CITRIS Model
Core
• Distributed
Info Systems
Technologies
Applications
• Quality-of-Life Emphasis
• Initially Leverage Existing
Expertise on campuses
• Micro sensors/actuators
• Human-Comp Interaction
• Prototype Deployment
Societal-Scale Information Systems
(SIS)
Foundations
• Transportation Systems
• Environmental Monitoring
& Natural Disaster Mitigation
• Distributed education
• Distributed biomonitoring
• Security, Policy
• Probabilistic Systems
• Formal Techniques
• Data management
• Simulation
Fundamental Underlying Science
CITRIS Initial Research Focus
 Transportation Systems
 By the use of sensors and advanced networking technology we can improve the
efficiency and utility of California highways while reducing pollution levels
 Improve carpooling efficiency using advanced scheduling
 Improve freeway utilization by managing traffic flows
 Environmental Monitoring & Natural Disaster Mitigation
 Smart Buildings
 Provide efficient, personalized response in the face of earthquake, fire, flood
 Must function at maximum performance under very difficult circumstances
 Air and water quality monitoring
 Distributed Biomonitoring
 Wristband biomonitors for chronic illness and the elderly
 Monitored remotely 24x7x365
 Emergency response and potential remote drug delivery
 Distributed Education
 Smart Classrooms
 We are proposing to build a life-long learning center that will be used to implement the
first years of the Merced undergraduate CS program and then used for other internal,
international, and industrial learning collaborations.
eMerging Societal-Scale Systems
Massive Cluster
From Nanoscopic to Terascale
Gigabit Ethernet
“Server”
“Client”
Clusters
Scalable, Reliable,
Secure Services
Information
Appliances
MEMS
BioMonitoring
New System Architectures
New Enabled Applications
Diverse, Connected, Physical,
Virtual, Fluid
Societal-Scale Information System (SIS)
 A revolutionary, planetary-scale Information Utility, enabling advanced





technologies to be exploited by broad communities of users.
An SIS learns how it is used and adapts its functions and interfaces to user
demands and the context of their activities
It achieves this through the provision of ‘fluid technologies’ for plug-and-play
component interoperation, introspection, dynamic adaptation, component
self-aggregation and self-organization, and ‘extreme personalization.’
Easily and naturally integrate devices, ranging from tiny sensors and
actuators to hand-held information appliances, workstations, and buildingsized cluster supercomputers—‘virtual computers’
Connected by short-range, unreliable wireless networks as well as by very
high-bandwidth, high-latency long-haul optical backbones.
Data and services must be secure, reliable, and high-performance, even if part
of the system is overloaded, down, disconnected, under repair, or under
attack
Implementation & Deployment of an
Oceanic Data Information Utility
(Professor John Kubiatowicz, et. al)
 Ubiquitous devices
require ubiquitous storage
 Consumers of data move, change
access devices, work in many
different physical places, etc.
 Needed properties:
Canadian
OceanStore
Sprint
AT&T
 Strong Security
 Coherence
 Automatic replica management and
Pac IBM
Bell
optimization
 Simple and automatic recovery from
disasters
 Utility model
Confederations of (Mutually Suspicious) Utilities
IBM
Smart Dust
MEMS-Scale Sensors/Actuators/Communicators
 Create a dynamic, ad-hoc network of power-aware sensors
 Explore system design issues
 Provide a platform to test Dust components
 Use off the shelf components initially
Micro Flying Insect
 ONR MURI/ DARPA funded
 Year 2 of 5 year project
 Professors Dickinson, Fearing (PI),
Liepmann, Majumdar, Pister, Sands, Sastry
Synthetic Insects
(Smart Dust with Legs)
Goal: Make silicon walk.
•Autonomous
•Articulated
•Size ~ 1-10 mm
•Speed ~ 1mm/s
CITRIS-Affiliated Research Activities
 International Computer Science Institute,(5 faculty, 18 students) studies





network protocols and applications and speech and language-based humancentered computing.
Millennium Project (15 faculty) is developing a powerful, networked
computational test bed of nearly 1,000 computers across campus to enable
interdisciplinary research.
Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center BSAC (14 faculty, 100 students) is a
world-leading effort specializing in micro-electromechanical devices (MEMS),
micro-fluidic devices, and “smart dust.”
Microfabrication Laboratory (71 faculty, 254 students) is a campus-wide
resource offering sophisticated processes for fabricating micro-devices and
micro-systems.
Gigascale Silicon Research Center (23 faculty, 60 students) addresses
problems in designing and testing complex, single-chip embedded systems
using deep sub-micron technology.
Berkeley Wireless Research Center (16 faculty, 114 students) is a consortium
of companies and DARPA programs to support research in low-power
wireless devices.
Applications-Related Current Activities
 Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways, PATH, (20 faculty, 70 students), a





collaboration between UC, Caltrans, other universities, and industry to develop
technology to improve transportation in California.
Berkeley Seismological Laboratory (15 faculty, 14 students) operates, collects,
and studies data from a regional seismological monitoring system, providing
earthquake information to state and local governments.
Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, PEER ( 25 faculty, 15
students), a Berkeley-led NSF center, is a consortium of nine universities
(including five UC campuses) working with industry and government to identify
and reduce earthquake risks to safety and to the economy.
National Center of Excellence in Aviation Operations Research, NEXTOR (6
faculty, 12 students), a multi-campus center, models and analyzes complex
airport and air traffic systems.
Human-Centered Systems: Adapting technology to people, not people to
technology (faculty from EECS, Psychology, Sociology, Education, SIMS, ME,
Business)
Bioengineering Research Center
PicoRadio
Extending the Scope and … Pushing the Envelope
Wireless node
Offices
Entrance
Exhibits
Cafe
Challeges to using sensor data in seismic
modeling and disaster response
 Position/motion/moisture/chemical/temperature/GPS
sensors across civil infrastructure
 Recent NRC report
 Increase knowledge of safety of buildings, bridges, …
 Improve emergency response
 Forecast earthquake impacts
 What to do with all the data?
 Vast, noisy, partial
 Use it to drive models of structures, tranport systems,…
 Where do we get the models?
Scanning in the Golden Gate Bridge
 Use existing 3D laser scanner
 St. Peter’s Basilica (“Fiat Lux” at SIGGRAPH)
 Taj Mahal, Michaelangelo’s David, Sather Tower
 Problems
 Registering multiple images
 Noise
 Meshing
 Feature extraction (materials)
 Hard to reach places
X-ray scans of reinforced concrete
SUGAR - A tool for MEMS Cad
 Descendant of Spice
 Goal: Fast and just accurate enough for design
 Full FE analysis too slow
 Scope so far
 3D electromechanical simulation
 steady state, modal, transient analyses
 Widely used
 100 designers at UCB
 Universities, govt labs, industry
 www-bsac.berkeley.edu/~cfm
 Web service
Challenges in MEMS Simulation
 Better Mechanical models
 Contact
 Multiscale robustness
 Reduced order modeling
 Sensitivity analysis
 Design Optimization
 Scalability
Eigenmodes of a MEMS mirror
MEMS Resonator
A stepper motor we’d like to simulate:
challenges of contact problems
Experimental Testbeds
Soda Hall
IBM
WorkPad
Velo
Nino
Smart
Dust
LCD Displays
MC-16
Motorola
Pagewriter 2000
CF788
Smart Classrooms
Audio/Video Capture Rooms
Pervasive Computing Lab
CoLab
WLAN /
Bluetooth
Wearable
Displays
GSM
BTS
Pager
H.323
GW
Network
Infrastructure
TCI @Home
Adaptive Broadband LMDS
Millennium Cluster
Millennium Cluster
CalRen/Internet2/NGI
Postdoc available
contact demmel@cs.berkeley.edu