The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interests of Society (CITRIS), a partnership between the University of California, Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz and UC Merced, has been awarded a $7.5 million grant by the National Science Foundation Information Technology Research program. The grant, involving UC Berkeley and UC Davis investigators, will support research on using information technology to boost energy efficiency of buildings and increase disaster preparedness.

The vision behind CITRIS is to make the real world "smart" with networks of tiny sensors. Networks of energy sensors in office buildings could monitor and control energy use, reducing both costs and greenhouse gas emissions. Emergency networks could save lives and property by providing advanced warning of disasters, getting accurate information to rescuers and authorities, and maintaining communications after a disaster.

UC Davis will receive $875,000 from the ITR award, said computer scientist Bernd Hamann. The money will go to Ben Yoo in the electrical and computer engineering department for developing high-speed network technology, and to Hamann, Ken Joy, Kwan-Liu Ma and Nelson Max at the Center for Image Processing and Integrated Computing to develop visualization and virtual reality systems that will enable scientists to work with very large amounts of data.

The NSF award is part of the federal government's ITR initiative, which will channel over $156 million in grants through NSF in the next three to five years.

CITRIS also announced last week that Ruzena Bajcsy, former head of the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at NSF, is to be the first director of the institute.

Bajcsy has over 40 years of research experience in robotics, artificial intelligence and machine perception. She also has interests in neuroscience and is a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine. She has two doctoral degrees, from Slovak Technical University, Slovakia, and from Stanford University. After graduating from Stanford, she joined the University of Pennsylvania where she founded the General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception (GRASP) laboratory in 1978.

Founded earlier this year, CITRIS is one of four California Institutes for Science and Innovation proposed in response to a plan by Governor Gray Davis to develop the next wave of technology. CITRIS will receive $100 million in state funds over the next four years, matched by at least $200 million in support from industry, grants and private donors.

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