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First, I want to thank my friend and colleague Paul Wright, and the excellent faculty and staff he has assembled in his years as Director, for making my transition into a new role at CITRIS such a smooth and hopeful one. Paul has done a stellar job strengthening CITRIS and advancing its mission of creating IT solutions to our most pressing social, environmental, and healthcare challenges. He has handed off an organization poised to continue doing great things in the world and it is reassuring to know Paul will be only one floor up in Sutardja Dai Hall, where he now leads the new Berkeley Energy and Climate Institute (BECI). I also

Dear Friends of CITRIS,

particularly want to thank Camille Crittenden who kept CITRIS at the top of its game during the transition by taking on the role of Deputy Director; I look forward to coordinating our efforts.

Evidence of CITRIS’s vibrant research across our four campuses may be seen in the recent announcement of the latest round of projects awarded CITRIS seed funding. The projects are all multi-campus and multi-disciplinary, reflecting our commitment to transcend both institutional and academic boundaries. Of the 44 proposals submitted, eleven will receive funding. These range from a Merced/Davis project that will employ drones and novel DNA sampling techniques to survey hard-to-access aquatic ecosystems, to a Davis/Santa Cruz project developing wearable, non-invasive heart sensors that can help predict heart failure outside the clinic, to a Berkeley/Davis collaboration using integrated electrostatic precipitators and sensors with engineered semiconductor nanotips for the super-

NEWS FROM THE DIRECTOR, “SEEDING OUR FUTURE”

Q&A WITH DIRECTOR SPANOSProfessor Costas Spanos became the fourth director of CITRIS on February 1, 2014.

GRADING THE STATEA mobile app closes the communication gap between citizens and their representatives

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CITRIS-UC.ORG // CENTER FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH IN THE INTEREST OF SOCIETYUC BERKELEY • UC DAVIS • UC MERCED • UC SANTA CRUZ

2 The CITRIS Signal April/May 2014

efficient monitoring of pollutants. Congratulations to the eleven winners, and thanks to all those who submitted proposals.

In addition to an introductory interview Gordy Slack conducted with me, this month’s newsletter includes an article about our Data and Democracy Initiative’s collaboration with Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom on the California Report Card. This elegant application stemmed from an encounter here at CITRIS between Ken Goldberg and Newsom back in September 2013 . An advocate of using IT to bridge the communication gap between constituents and their representatives, Newsom encouraged Goldberg and his team to develop an online platform for the public grading the state on its performance in various categories and offer suggestions for issues the state should address. It is another promising example of technology employing a big idea to address a huge challenge.

Lieutenant Governor Newsom returned to CITRIS on Thursday, March 20, for a public forum, “The California Report Card: Learning from a New Platform for Civic Engagement,” which also featured Ken Goldberg; Henry E. Brady, Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy; and Marina Gorbis of the Institute for the Future. I hope you can watch the event at your convenience on our YouTube Channel.It is an honor and a pleasure for me to be moving into the center of action here at CITRIS. I am grateful for the opportunity to help deploy our University ’s resources to address some of California’s—and the world’s—most pressing challenges.

Forward,

Costas J. SpanosDirector, CITRISBanatao Institute@CITRIS Berkeley

Pictured on front cover: Students in the CITRIS Invention Lab working with Afinia H-Series 3d printing equipment. http://invent.citris-uc.org

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Q & A W I T H

C O S T A S S P A N O S

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April/May 2014 The CITRIS Signal 3

Professor Costas Spanos became the fourth director of CITRIS on February 1, 2014. He is Andrew S. Grove Professor and Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) and leads the Singapore-based SinBerBEST project, which focuses on improving the energy efficiency of buildings.

Spanos joined the UC Berkeley faculty 25 years ago and has since served as Chair of EECS, Director of the Berkeley Microfabrication Laboratory, Associate Dean for Research, and the founding Director and CEO of the Berkeley Educational Alliance for Research in Singapore (BEARS), a UC-owned corporation in Singapore funded by the Singaporean government.

In February 2014, Gordy Slack interviewed Spanos in his light-filled EECS office on the 5th floor of Berkeley’s Cory Hall. The room overlooks San Francisco Bay and Spanos had a telescope set up in the large picture window. On a nearby shelf sat a radio-controlled sailboat, given to Spanos when he stepped down as Department Chair of EECS.

Gordy Slack: The EECS office we’re in now is just a couple of minutes from CITRIS headquarters? Are you planning to move over there? How will the new position at CITRIS change your daily routine?

Costas Spanos: There will be a transition period. Right now I’m running a big organization in Singapore, BEARS, and I will still have that duty for a while. This semester I’m also teaching; my classes were scheduled before the CITRIS decision was made and I can’t change that. I like teaching, but after this semester I’ll take a break from it to focus on CITRIS.

GS: CITRIS has changed a lot over the past decade. How would you like to alter its trajectory?

CS: That trajectory has been quite impressive. I like the basic structure that I see right now. The four areas we cover really represent the aims of CITRIS well: Data and Democracy, Energy, Infrastructure, and Healthcare. But I would like to see a better integration of our intellectual assets. For example, the Marvell Nanofabrication laboratory is an amazing asset. It occupies a big part of our physical space, but it also represents a huge investment, and a huge programmatic opportunity! It is the best academic facility of its type and already provides service to a large part of the community. But I think we can integrate it within CITRIS in an even more meaningful way.

Different areas of CITRIS could be more tightly integrated. Just today I had a discussion with PATH



Directors Robert Horowitz and Tom West about how our work in infrastructure and their work in transportation systems have quite a bit of intellectual overlap. I’d like to exploit that and strengthen our partnerships in those areas.

GS: How about other campuses?

CS: I look forward to seeing first hand what’s happening on the other campuses and to talking with the campus directors about how best to leverage their programs.

I am certainly impressed by things happening here at Berkeley. The Invention Lab is an exciting facility, and the students bring a lot of energy. I am also impressed with the Foundry; I have been involved with a few startups and I know that to succeed you need infrastructure, mentorship, and support. The Foundry provides these.

CITRIS is getting a lot of attention. This month we had a visit by the President of the University, Janet Napolitano, and just recently we had a visit from Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame and a meeting in San Francisco with the French Minister of Research and Education, Genevieve Fioraso. Minister Fioraso mentioned how well known CITIRS is in Europe. The

strength of the CITRIS brand is a strong testament to my predecessors.

GS: How would you describe that brand?

CS: I’ve seen the CITRIS brand mostly from the perspective of my work in Asia. But around the world, CITRIS essentially represents the University of California and the information technology work that is happening here. Of course Berkeley is a big name in that. But everyone also knows CITRIS is a multi-campus organization and that aspect is essential to its identity. And of course, CITRIS doesn’t just represent information technology research; it is all about how that IT is being channeled for the social good. The emphasis is on the application, the context.

There are national research labs in Europe and Asia, but when it comes to an academic facility that puts technology into context and does it on a world scale and in an interdisciplinary way, CITRIS is unique.

GS: In what ways are CITRIS’s multi-campus aspect and its multi-disciplinary approach advantages?

CS: When you try to address a problem, you can pull together resources that just don’t exist in any single place. For instance, look at the collaborations between UC Berkeley engineers and UC Davis clinicians in the healthcare initiative, or the joint projects in water research among investigators at Berkeley, Davis and Merced. Or the exciting work on the cancer genome that is likely going to happen among computer scientists and health informatics experts in Davis, Berkeley and Santa Cruz. These are things you cannot find together in one place or in one discipline.

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The Invention Lab students bring a lot of energy to the campus.



Long before CITRIS, we’d already become good at crossing disciplines in a more limited way. Within information technology, for example, people doing physical electronics, systems research, and signals were all working together. But CITRIS took the leap more than a decade ago to involve disciplines far beyond engineering. By going beyond these engineering fields, however broad, and looking at the impact that can be achieved on society, that’s what the Institute is all about. To have real impact, CITRIS is bringing technology to the humanities and social sciences, and vice versa.

GS: You’ve worked most of your career in academia, but you were at DEC for a few years after coming out of Carnegie Mellon. What role does industry have to play in CITRIS?

CS: I spent the first three years of my career in industry. And even here at Berkeley, most of my research has been supported by industrial funds, usually coming from multiple companies that would normally be competing with each other in the marketplace.

The university presents a common space where companies can contemplate the pre-competitive future that is some distance from their critical path.

To do that in the context of a research powerhouse brings companies the value to explore alternate opportunities at fairly low risk. They can stay abreast of what is coming from beyond the horizon. And the arrangement brings value to the university, too. If support comes from multiple competing companies, where no one corporate agenda can steer the program, it can maintain an amazing context in which to explore those key pre-competitive problems.

That kind of industry relationship has been playing a role in CITRIS from day one. CITRIS started with matching industrial, foundation, and state funds. And it still plays a very significant role.

GS: You were director of what’s now called the Marvell Nanofabrication Lab for several years.

CS: Yes, then it was called the Berkeley Microfabrication Laboratory. That is an interesting story. In the 1960s a lot of people started working on integrated circuits; it was a very exciting technology, but everybody assumed it was too late for universities to be involved in any important way. They assumed all the important work in the field was going to be commercial and universities would have to just stick to the theoretical stuff. But a bunch of professors here said “not so fast. There

By going beyond these engineering fields, however broad, and looking at the impact that can be achieved on society, that’s what the Institute is all about.“ -Director Costas Spanos, CITRIS

“



is still so much more pre-competitive stuff to be discovered.” And they formed the Microfabrication Lab. They also chose to break the standard academic mold; back then professors would have their own laboratories and would guard their territory jealously. But those guys decided, “No, there is an element of scale here, a critical mass that no one of us can achieve alone.” They decided to join their efforts, to share a laboratory and open it up even to those who wouldn’t have had the resources to even consider going into this area. And this clean-room user facility, now in almost its fifth decade, has been amazingly successful. It has evolved to stay ahead of some very expensive technology, and has managed to contribute tremendously. MEMS [microelectromechanical systems] were invented here. FinFET, the transistors that are mostly used today, were invented here. There are many other examples. Who knows what else will be invented here in years to come? And it has been used by hundreds of people who wouldn’t have been able to afford their own laboratory. Of course, imitation is a high compliment, and many other big universities decided to have common facilities as well; so MIT and Stanford and other big places have excellent facilities today, and we collaborate broadly with them. But with the expansion and move to the CITRIS space, the Marvell Nanolab is now the best. No question.

GS: So the model of the shared academic lab focused on technological innovation with great relevance to industry predates CITRIS. Are the Invention Lab and the Foundry built on a similar model?

CS: The Foundry is about catalyzing startups, which of course has also been an important part of what the Nanolab does. The Invention Lab is actually the

same intellectual model: create a common facility, lower the barrier to entry for people to come and use it, give them support to use it, and have them come and play. In a facility like this, not only can you conduct your own experiments, but you’re also interacting with dozens of other people working around you; unexpected collaborations happen. The Invention Lab is similar, just on a different scale: it’s about 3D printing, prototyping, and giving even undergraduate students a very low barrier to come and invent. Another parallel is that the Marvell Nanolab is like the hub of a big wheel, one with many spokes that lead to other laboratories doing many different things. The Invention Lab should be viewed the same way. For example, there is a sister laboratory in the electrical engineering space called the Super Node; it is the archetypical “maker space.” This is also an invention lab but instead of specializing in 3D printing and system design it specializes in electronic hacking. So you have these complementary capabilities. We’re now starting to see student groups moving back and forth.

GS: Finally, is your telescope pointing at the Berkeley Marina? Are you keeping an eye on a boat down there?

CS: This whole view is so amazing. But yes, the telescope is usually pointed at the marina where my boat normally is, or at the other sailors down there. I sometimes watch other people sailing when I don’t have the time to go myself.



Information technology holds great potential for giving politicians and civic leaders a more nuanced, interactive, and frequent read on the public mind, writes California’s lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom in his new book Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government. Last September, at a CITRIS symposium titled “Can ‘Open Data’ Improve Democratic Governance?” Newsom and Ken Goldberg hatched a plan to create an application that would use the latest mobile technology to address an important communication gap in the State’s government.

The California Report Card (http://californiareportcard.org /mobile), or CRC, allows participants to quickly grade the state’s performance on a handful of subjects, indicate the importance of those issues to them, and suggest new subjects and evaluate others’ suggestions for issues to be included in the next report card. Participants can also see how their grades compare to other participants’ views.

The CRC stems from an earlier collaboration between Goldberg and the U.S. State Department. The online platform Opinion Space attracts volunteers from around the world to suggest, evaluate, and explore

insights about U.S. foreign relations. CRC has a simpler design and a much lower threshold for participation, says Goldberg, co-director with Camille Crittenden of the CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative. Users are not asked to identify themselves beyond their zip code, and even that is optional: anyone can log on and submit grades for the issues at hand. The user interface is straightforward, allowing citizens to provide feedback to the government–and data for Goldberg and his collaborators–in just a couple of minutes.

The app instructs participants to grade the State of California on “six timely issues.” The current report card addresses healthcare, education, marriage equality, immigrant rights, and marijuana decriminalization. Users position a dot on a slider with “A+” at one end and “F” at the other. Once a grade is assigned, the average grade for that item

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G R A D I N G T H E S T A T EA m o b i l e a p p c l o s e s t h e c o m m u n i c a t i o n g a p b e t w e e n c i t i z e n s a n d t h e i r r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s .

The California Report Card allows users to assign grades to the State of California on timely issues. Credit: Irene Chen/Daily Californian



is revealed. When a user has assigned grades on all six issues, she moves into the discussion section, where more specific questions posed by other users pop up and can be graded as well. These are marked on two criteria: 1) their importance for inclusion on the next report card and 2) the state’s current performance on the issue. For example, one question proposed by a user reads: “Located in earthquake country, California will inevitably experience large, devastating seismic events. How would you grade California’s seismic preparedness?” Assigning an “A” suggests the user thinks the state is doing a good job preparing for the Big One, an “F” that she thinks the state is not well prepared. Then the user evaluates the importance of the question, again on a scale of A to F. If she thinks the state is falling short, but it’s not very important, that might not indicate the subject needs a lot of attention. But if the state is doing badly and users collectively deem the subject very important, that should be a wakeup call, says Sanjay Krishnan, a graduate student of Goldberg’s and the programmer for the project. “The really interesting questions are the ones that lots of users find very important and on which they also agree that the state is underachieving,” says Krishnan.

Some of those discrepancies are predictable, others less so. “One surprise,” says Brandie Nonnecke, CRC’s project manager, “is that disaster preparedness is emerging as a dominant concern of Californians.” People across the political spectrum might disagree about immigration or whether marijuana should be legal, but they tend to agree that the state needs to prepare for disasters. “It’s a really important idea, and the fact that it emerged from participants’ comments suggests the power of the platform for

facilitating constituent feedback,” Nonnecke says.

Whereas Opinion Space was programmed in Flash, the CRC employs HTML5, a markup language that works well across platforms, including mobile devices, says Krishnan. “The app works on both laptops and smartphones, but is specifically optimized for the mobiles,” he says. “We thought focusing on smartphones would give the project a broader reach. If someone is surfing on their phone and sees a tweet about the project they don’t have to remember it and go home and fire up their laptop. The barrier to entry is much lower.”

Focusing on mobile platforms presented challenges, though. “From a programming point of view, making an app that works well on mobile devices that move in and out of network connectivity was harder than I anticipated. It required that we keep things very simple.”

That simplicity had other design advantages, too. The application’s intuitive interface is one explanation for its early success. As of mid March, the CRC has about 7,000 users from counties across the state.

Outreach has been a major part of the project, says Nonnecke, who describes her role of project manager as “making sure the moving parts keep moving.” At this point, she said, that mostly means “reaching out to more remote areas of the state.” So far, 53 of California’s 58 counties are represented. Nonnecke has been calling public organizations in still un- and under-represented counties. When she reaches a librarian, for example, she explains the aim of the work and the importance of broad representation.



“For the most part,” she says, “people really want to have their voices heard. The underrepresented counties are often a little out of the way and sometimes feel their opinions get lost.”

The biggest and perhaps most hopeful insight so far, says Krishnan, was how little polarization has been reflected in people’s responses. “On all six issues there were no statistically-significant differences between regions. When you phrase the question as a grading problem, people from all different parts of the political spectrum tend to agree on what is really important and on how the state has performed.”

On Thursday, 20 March, CITRIS hosted “The California Report Card: Learning from a New Platform for Civic Engagement,” a forum featuring Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, Professor Ken Goldberg, Dr. Marina Gorbis, Director of the Institute of the Future Director, and Professor Henry Brady, Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy. The forum was webcast live and is archived for viewing on the CITRIS YouTube channel.http://bit.ly/CRCvideos

To participate, visit: http://californiareportcard.org /mobile

UPCOMING EVENTSFor more event details and registration, visit: http://citris.eventbrite.com

CITRIS Mobile App ChallengeThrough April 2014

This challenge encourages teams of UC Berkeley students to develop innovative mobile applications for today’s most pressing societal needs. Through a rigorous 3-month process, students will design, prototype and pitch their ideas. The challenge will culminate in a selection process with prizes, along with a Demo Day to showcase the student’s projects. http://mobileappchallenge.org/+facebook/citrismobileapp

Groundtruth and Airwaves: Sensor Networks and Emerging Technology for Environmental JournalismApril 30, 2014, 1:00-5:00pm

Technology–as remote as satellites and as close as our smartphones–offers new opportunities for collecting data about environmental topics. Evidence of rising sea levels, poor air quality, noise pollution and more can now be gathered from wireless sensor networks, open public data sets, and user-generated data from social media platforms. These tools make it simpler to gather, analyze and visualize data, helping to drive news stories for journalists and more thoughtful engagement and advocacy by activists.

Registration Required: http://groundtruthandairwaves.eventbrite.comGeneral Admission $20 /Faculty & Staff $10 / Student $5Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeley

Research Exchange Seminars Spring 2014 ScheduleWednesdays, 12:00p-1:00p

Free and open to the public, the Research Exchange Seminar Series is a weekly roundtable of presentations and discussions that highlights ways to frame and tackle societal-scale research issues. Speakers this semester include Christopher Couper [IBM], Severin Borenstein [Energy Institute at Haas], Tanja Aitamurto [Data & Democracy Initiative], Kamyar Guivetchi [CA Dept of Water Resources] and many more.

Free with RegistrationBanatao Auditorium*Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeleyhttp://citris-uc.org/events/category/research-exchange-seminar/ *Locations subject to change.



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THE CITRIS SIGNAL

Editor: Yvette Subramanian

Contributing Writer: Gordy Slack

Design: Cheryl Martinez

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CITRIS’s mission, to “shorten the pipeline” between research innovations and their application to real-world problems, requires investment from a range of partners. We receive funding from the University of California, as well as corporations, foundations, and individuals committed to improving the lives of Californians and others around the world. If you would like to support our work in health care, energy, intelligent infrastructures, or data and democracy, please consider making a gift online or contact our Director of Finance, [email protected]. Thank you!

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