When Governor Gray Davis signed the 2001-2002 state budget last month, he threw the switch on one of the largest and most ambitious research projects in the state - the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interests of Society, or CITRIS.
"It's an exciting new area and a very exciting new project for the state and the nation," said engineering dean Zuhair Munir.
There's certainly plenty of excitement to go 'round at UC Davis, where 11 faculty members are involved. Now that the budget is approved, projects are moving into high gear.
The futuristic vision behind CITRIS is to make the real world "smart." In the CITRIS world, billions of tiny sensors will be built into buildings, float on air currents, swim in streams and lakes or be planted in the soil. They will measure air and water pollution, detect earthquakes and wildfires and monitor energy use, traffic flows and medical emergencies. They will feed information over high-speed networks to powerful computers that will turn it into visible form.
"CITRIS is not just about building machines, computers and chips - it's about developing technology driven by the big needs of society," said Bernd Hamann, co-director of the Center for Image Processing and Integrated Computing at UC Davis.
One project alone, making buildings more energy efficient, could save the state $8 billion a year, according to the CITRIS proposal document.
Lead by UC Berkeley, CITRIS is a partnership between UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz and UC Merced. It was originally proposed in 2000 as one of the California Institutes for Science and Innovation, but did not make the final cut. But Davis was sufficiently impressed to allocate $20 million for CITRIS in this year's budget. Over four years, CITRIS will receive $100 million in state funds, with another $250 million promised from federal grants, commercial sponsorship and private funds.
CITRIS will involve over 100 faculty members and hundreds of graduate students at the four campuses, said Ben Yoo, who chairs the committee coordinating CITRIS activities at UC Davis.
At the UC Davis department of electrical and computer engineering, Yoo is planning CITRIS-NET, a high-speed fiber-optic network that will connect the Sacramento area with the Bay Area and the Central Valley. The network will use fibers in cable already in the ground, but will vastly increase capacity by using an all-optical router developed by Yoo's lab.
Routers are computers that sit at the crossroads of networks. They turn light from fiber-optic cables into electronic signals, decide what to do with them, then send them on their way. Switching takes time and can cause signals to jitter and break up. The all-optical routers avoid this bottleneck by dealing only with light. As well as being very fast, Yoo's router crams more data into a cable by using many different colors for different signals.
The all-optical network could transfer data at speeds of Terabits (a million million bits) per second, Yoo said. That's over a 100,000 times faster than the 10-baseT cable in the back of a typical desktop computer on campus.
Yoo's lab has already conducted one experiment, successfully using optical routers to send signals on a 300-mile round trip between Livermore and Burlingame.
He also hopes to hook up CITRIS researchers at UC Davis through a high-speed optical network on campus.
"The fiber's in the ground - we just have to connect to it and add optical routers," he said. Yoo reckons the cost at around $30,000.
Matching traffic flows with air quality is the aim of a project lead by civil and environmental engineering chair Debbie Niemeier. The proposed system will combine existing traffic cameras and air pollution monitoring stations with a computer database. The system will produce rapidly updated air quality maps so that communities can respond quickly to increasing air pollution, she said.
Another environmental project, led by geologist Jeff Mount, will use new technologies funded by CITRIS to monitor water use in the Cosumnes River watershed. The data will be publicly available over the web.
"This research will help us to better understand the linked systems that affect day-to-day watershed management, including surface water, groundwater, soil conditions, water and air quality, atmospheric deposition, habitat conditions and hazards," Niemeier said.
The systems built by CITRIS will generate a continual flood of data, said Hamann. This data will need to be analyzed and displayed. Hamann's visualization group members will apply their expertise to make communication with computers more human-centered and intuitive, he said.
Hamann sees three major developments in the near future: very large video display walls to show large amounts of data; virtual reality rooms where researchers on different campuses can look at the same data at the same time; and technology to mine data for useful information.
Other UC Davis faculty involved in CITRIS are Jonathan Heritage, Paul Hurst, Stephen Lewis and Richard Spencer at Electrical and Computer Engineering; Bruce Kutter and Jay Lund at Civil and Environmental Engineering; Karl Levitt at Computer Science. Six new faculty to be hired in the college of engineering would likely work in CITRIS projects, Munir said. It would also help to attract new faculty, he said.
"I believe that the impact on the university will be very great," Munir said. "It will make the University of California well-known for an integrated approach to societal problems."