Since 2022, a team of CITRIS-affiliated researchers from UC Berkeley, UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz, led by UC Berkeley’s Kenichi Soga, has been creating highly detailed models of emergency response infrastructure in two Bay Area communities to answer questions like those.

To learn more about wildfire risk in the Bay Area and how simulations and serious games can help the region prepare, UC Berkeley News spoke with Louise Comfort, project co-principal investigator, professor emerita and project scientist with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Read more from UC Berkeley News.

Image credit: Screen capture from a prototype of a Bolinas evacuation video game created by UC Davis Professor Thomas Maiorana, showing a plume of wildfire smoke above a map of the Marin County town, courtesy of Paola Lorusso

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CITRIS researcher Ken Goldberg, a UC Berkeley professor of industrial engineering and operations research, joined actor and comedian Dax Shepard for the Jan. 8 episode of the popular Armchair Expert podcast, in which Shepard explores how challenges and setbacks have led to people’s growth and improvement.

Learn more and listen to Armchair Expert.

Watch on YouTube.

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On Dec. 5–7, the 2024 Pacific Rim Conference on Healthcare Innovation (PRC-HI 2024), jointly hosted by the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University (FAH-SYSU) and the Health initiative of CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, was held in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. Experts from top academic and medical institutions worldwide gathered to discuss the future of robotic surgery, health data science and innovations in medical artificial intelligence (AI).

Alexandre Bayen, director of CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, noted that the cooperation between FAH-SYSU and CITRIS demonstrates their institutions’ ability to set new benchmarks in clinical care, technology, training and health data science.

“Through this partnership, we are addressing vital global health challenges, advancing the fields of surgical robotics and artificial intelligence for medicine, and setting the stage for future development,” he said.

Between the conference’s special sessions, attendees celebrated groundbreaking researchers and leaders. Among them was Jingwen Zhang, an associate professor in the Department of Communications at UC Davis, who received the inaugural Lingnan Award for Excellence in Health Informatics for her work in health informatics.

Read more about the PRC-HI 2024 conference in GDToday.

Read more about Zhang’s award from the UC Davis Department of Communication.

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With support from a 2024 CITRIS at UC Santa Cruz Interdisciplinary Innovation Award (I2P), professor of art Jennifer Parker is partnering with Weiss to create fog catchers — vertical wooden frames that supports fine plastic mesh — across the Bay Area to serve as both public art and sustainable solution, aiming to inspire conservation and encourage viewers to connect with their environment.

Read more from the San Francisco Chronicle.

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Ricardo Sanfelice, director of CITRIS Aviation and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, and Stefano Carpin, a CITRIS-affiliated researcher and professor of computer science and engineering at UC Merced, are collaborating with colleagues at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico to address the challenges of harvesting berries.

Supported by funding from the University of California’s Alianza MX initiative, the team plans to pursue technological solutions that will make berry cultivation and harvesting processes safer and less labor intensive for workers. Mindful of a workforce shortage and high product demand within the agricultural industry, they will test a sensing system powered by machine learning and computer vision to monitor berry health and maturity in greenhouses. The group will also explore adapting robotics to delicately harvest berries, routing robots through orchards with maximal efficiency and prolonging berry quality for shipment. 

“Berry harvesting involves a lot of very interesting fundamental robotics control problems, which we have researched in different contexts and we can apply to this very important problem,” said Sanfelice. “Then there’s also the societal impact aspect, which I’m very interested in: How do we actually support the workforce in order to create technological solutions that are not only efficient, but also ethical?”’

The team will collaborate with agricultural industry partners throughout the project to ensure they are aligned with the needs of growers and workers.

Read more from the UC Santa Cruz Newscenter.

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Alexandre Bayen, director of CITRIS and the Banatao Institute and a UC Berkeley professor, and Susan Handy, a CITRIS researcher and professor in the department of environmental science and policy at UC Davis, have been selected to receive honorary doctorates from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands for their contributions to smart and sustainable mobility. 

Bayen’s research seeks to integrate machine learning with cloud computing to enable on-road vehicle communication and collaborative traffic control. In a recent experiment, one hundred automated vehicles used these algorithms to collectively reduce stop-and-go traffic on Interstate 24 in Nashville, Tennessee, improving overall energy consumption by up to 10 percent and curbing a significant source of energy waste and accidents.

Handy’s focus lies in the core set of ideas — freedom, speed and mobility, among others — that shape the United States’ dependency on driving. Approaching from the societal perspective, she examines the shifts in professional thinking required to embrace a more sustainable transportation system, and the role of research in supporting these shifts. 

Read more from the Delft University of Technology.

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CITRIS Aviation, a multicampus research initiative of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS) at the University of California (UC), has selected four student teams to compete in Phase 2 of the 2024–25 CITRIS Aviation Prize design contest. 

Building on the 2023–24 competition, which focused on conceptual designs for an air transportation network connecting the four CITRIS campuses, this year’s challenge tasks the teams to develop air operations simulation software for the proposed system. 

“We are thrilled that the work of the teams will contribute to the advancement of air mobility and a particular instantiation, exploring flights between the CITRIS campuses at Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Merced and Davis,” said Alexandre Bayen, director of CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, associate provost for the Berkeley Space Center, and Liao-Cho Innovation Endowed Chair and professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. 

The first phase of the competition drew submissions from multidisciplinary teams that included undergraduate and graduate students, with participants representing fields such as aerospace engineering, computer science, environmental engineering and robotics. Submissions were evaluated for their creativity, feasibility, and potential to address the technical and logistical challenges of intercampus air transportation.

The following four teams will move on to Phase 2:

• UC Berkeley:
  • Team members: Jorge Duarte Urbina, Jordan Keoki Kam, Atiila Kharobo, Andrew Park, Rishi Kumar Srinivasan
  • Advisers: Vishwanath Bulusu, Lecturer of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Raja Sengupta, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering 
• UC Davis:
  • Team members: Oliver Austin, Shreya Chandra, Yemikael Dawit, Nicolas Holasek, Rachel Long, Orfeas Magoulas
  • Advisers: Camli Badrya, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering; Zhaodan Kong, Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering; Peng Wei, Postdoctoral Researcher of Biological and Agricultural Engineering
• UC Merced:
  • Team members: Yael Xavier Andujar, Monica Cruz Gaspar, Ana Hernandez, Kyra Ruiz, Randy Serrano
  • Adviser: Francesco Danzi, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering
• UC Santa Cruz:
  • Team members: Alexander Aghili, Andre Aledia, Parsh Gandhi, Zoe La Clair, Jose Peralta, Christine Perez, Eric Vin
  • Adviser: Daniel Fremont, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering

In the coming months, the teams will refine their proposals into comprehensive designs, with mentorship from experts in the aviation industry and academia. They will also participate in regular project review meetings to receive feedback and gain insights into professional engineering practices.

“Our UC Davis team is very excited to participate in the competition,” said Kong. “Our vision is to use this competition as a catalyst to inspire our students to work on problems of significant societal impact, to foster collaborations with researchers from other UC campuses, and, hopefully, to promote northern California as an advanced air mobility hub.”

This year’s competition introduces new awards to recognize excellence in the teams’ designs, including the Atech Award for Most Innovative Design for Air Mobility, which will be accompanied by a $6,000 cash prize. 

“Atech is very proud to be part of such a great initiative led by CITRIS,” said Mauro do Santo Junior, head of innovation and engineering at Atech, an Embraer’s group company that develops technology solutions for air traffic management, cybersecurity, instrumentation and control systems, and more. “The quality of the projects and the level of detail taken into account exceed our expectations. 

“We would like to congratulate all the teams for the hard work and we are looking forward to the next steps of this competition.”

Other confirmed sponsors include electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft developers Archer Aviation and Supernal, and software developer MathWorks. 

The competition will culminate in late spring 2025, when the teams present their final designs to a panel of judges from CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, the NASA Ames Research Center, and sponsoring companies and organizations. The winning presentations will be assessed on innovation, environmental impact and integration with existing transportation systems.

Now in its third iteration, the CITRIS Aviation Prize launched in 2021 with a mission to advance the science and design of sustainable air mobility. 

“The air operations system that the teams are developing is a critical component of the envisioned air mobility infrastructure designed during last year’s competition, paving the way to an eventual campus-to-campus air transportation system for the University of California,” said Ricardo Sanfelice, director of CITRIS Aviation and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Santa Cruz.

To learn more about the competition and stay updated on the teams’ progress, please visit the CITRIS Aviation Prize webpage.

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This spring, join CITRIS and the Banatao Institute and the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute (C3.ai DTI) to explore the latest breakthroughs in autonomous systems and robotics. This series will feature academic, civic and industry experts who are pushing the boundaries of innovation in fields from perception and sensing to control systems, and from autonomous navigation to machine learning, and more.

Free and open to the public — no registration necessary! — the talks will take place in Room 250 on the second floor of Sutardja Dai Hall at UC Berkeley on Tuesdays from 11 a.m. to noon PT. Seating is first come, first served. 

• Jan. 28:
  Cathy Wu
  Associate Professor at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  “Learning-guided Optimization for Mobility”
• Feb. 4: 
  Zhenhui “Jessie” Li
  Chief Scientist, Yunqi Academy of Engineering
  “The Critical Role of Cyber Infrastructure in City Innovation and Beyond”
• *Feb. 11:
  Vincent Vanhoucke
  Distinguished Engineer, Waymo
  “AI for Autonomous Driving at Scale”
• Feb. 25:
  Terry Fong
  Chief Roboticist, NASA Ames Research Center; Deputy Rover Manager, VIPER Lunar Mission, NASA
  “The NASA Volatiles Inspecting Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) Mission”
• March 4:
  Mac Schwager
  Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University
  “Perception-rich Robot Autonomy With Neural Environment Models”
• March 11:
  Jeannette Bohg
  Assistant Professor for Robotics, Stanford University
  “A Vision for Robotics in the Age of Foundation Models”
• March 18:
  Grace Gao
  Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University
  “Towards Autonomous Driving on the Moon”
• April 1:
  Andrea Bajcsy
  Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
  “Towards Open World Robot Safety”
• April 15:
  Dorsa Sadigh
  Associate Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University
  “The Data Problem for Pre- and Post-training of Robotics Foundation Models”
• *April 22:
  Russ Tedrake
  Toyota Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Vice President of Robotics Research, Toyota Research Institute
  “Large Behavior Models: Testing Specific Hypotheses About Multitask Learning for Dexterous Manipulation”
• April 29:
  Ricardo Sanfelice
  Professor and Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz; Director, CITRIS Aviation
  “Hybrid Systems Methods to Enable Use of AI-driven Algorithms: Formal Guarantees for Robustness and Performance”

*The UC Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR) is co-sponsoring the presentations by Tedrake and Vanhoucke.

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Grace Gu, a UC Berkeley assistant professor and the recipient of a 2021 CITRIS Seed Award, has been described by the journal Nature as a “game-changing” materials science researcher, lauded for bringing a fresh perspective to solving big challenges in the field.

Gu takes inspiration from the mathematical world to design composite materials that are tough, adaptable and cost-effective. Her recent endeavors include designing materials based on aperiodic monotiles, or nonrepeating surface patterns, that can withstand stress and deformation better than conventional tile structures and using machine learning to identify new materials properties at a much faster rate. 

Read more from Nature.

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